Quote:
Originally Posted by lnx64
Little curious there, you mention color TV's from the 80's and 90's cant have their color temperature adjusted.. I'm not so sure that is true. They all still have drive and cut controls for the reds, greens, and blues.. And that alone can adjust the color temperature.
|
Brandon, what I meant was that color sets of the '80s-'90s do not have a front panel control to adjust color temperature as the older sets did. However, as I mentioned in my post, today's flat screens (and perhaps a few inexpensive '80s-'90s CRT sets) do have three-step color temperature adjustments as a menu option.
Most TVs that had any kind of color-fidelity (temperature) control had it on the front panel, along with the color intensity and tint. Some manufacturers, notably Magnavox, had only a 2-position slide switch on the back of the set, to turn the effect on or off. Magnavox called their color-temperature control Chromatone. Zenith called their color-fidelity adjustment the Color Commander, Panasonic or Sony (don't remember which) had the "Color Pilot", and so on. These controls could inject a soft blue or red color into a b&w picture, but most set owners found the adjustment too critical, too confusing, or both, so they just left the control set at midrange (black and white or neutral) and forgot it. Some people watched their expensive color sets literally for years or decades (!) with seriously incorrect colors (because they did not know how to adjust the color controls) or in black and white because they did not realize that, on a color set, the fine tuning control must be adjusted exactly in order for the color to show at all. That was why automatic color adjustment schemes (RCA's ACM, Zenith's Color Sentry, et al.) and automatic fine tuning controls were introduced by many high-end TV manufacturers (and later incorporated in all sets) -- to take the guesswork out of properly tuning in a color picture.
These systems, however, often did not adjust colors properly, leaving the viewer to turn off the automatic control and set the color controls manually. General Electric's VIR (Vertical Interval Reference) auto-color system of the '80s was one of the worst in this regard. I maintain the best way to tune in a color picture on an older color set is to turn off any auto-color control scheme your set may have, and adjust the color and tint manually until the picture looks right to your eyes. The viewer is a much better judge of picture quality than the best automatic color control system on earth.