[Pete Deksnis]

This thread seems to have become aligned with a quest of mine: trying to discover what 1953 NTSC color actually looks (looked) like. To that end, this morning I did another side-by-side comparison between the CT-100 and a modern HDTV operating in NTSC mode, with both sets driven by the same OTA rooftop antenna.

As inspired by old-tv-nut earlier in the thread, I balanced the sets in terms of brightness, contrast, color, and tint. This meant pushing the CT-100 to a point just below where, on super-bright screens, the raster begins to bloom when the load is so great the 6BD4 H-V regulator can no longer maintain adequate ultor voltage (which occur quite often but usually only in commercials where the screen is driven very white with only a minor amount of pastel text). Conversely, the HDTV set was throttled back to match the brightness and contrast and color of its elder.


In a nutshell:

CT-100 displays better white than the modern set, which tends to reproduce more 'eggshell' in hue than the CT-100's white.

CT-100 displays more saturated blue than the modern set, which seems to reproduce a less 'bright' blue of possibly even a different hue.

CT-100 displays a less bright red than the modern set, which tends to reproduce the 'red' with a clear shift in hue towards orange.

CT-100 seems to display green with greater saturation in general and hue seems to be simply more 'green' than the modern set.

Finally, it's important to remember that these observations were made with sets that were adjusted to produce pictures that look identical most of the time. The 'greens' matched each other. Ditto the blue and red. Only occasionally would a given hue be different between the two sets.

The above observations were made watching PBS kid's shows on channel 13 from NYC.
--------------------------------
A further observation was made this morning watching GMA on channel 7 from NYC. Here the cameras are HDTV where the camera matrix, if I interpret old-tv-net correctly, mates the camera and modern HDTV-spec phosphors.

In a nutshell:

Much of the GMA studio has colors that do not translate from HDTV to 1953 NTSC very well. Areas of the GMA set swing very bright on the CT-100, away from the subdued orange-like hue, and on almost to white. This is the only OTA video I've seen that shows a striking difference between the two television standards.


[I wanted to switch the modern set between NTSC and ATSC modes to confirm that there was essentially no visual difference between the two, but the ABC digital transmitter (ch. 45 in NYC) was either off the air or another channel 45 from somewhere skipped in and swamped my ATSC front end. [the ATSC-equivalent of FM capture ratio must suck!]