What color TV was really like back then...

[Charlie]

A few days back, some of you had mentioned dollar DVD's. Last night, I found a bunch of them at Walmart for 88 cents. I grabbed several... some of them being black and white and some in color.

One of the color DVD's was The Lucy Show. Only being 88 cents, it was clear that they didn't remake the color on this particular show. Although I enjoyed the show, the color was absolutely awful! It made me realize that this is probably what watching color TV in the 50's and 60's was really like. The audio was pretty bad as well. My mother had told me in the past that color TV wasn't really that great during the 60's... now I realize what she was talking about.

Another example of this is in my old original Star Trek episodes on VHF that I bought back in the 80's. On the tape, the episode itself is pretty good as far as color is concerned. Following the episode, they show what was coming on next week. That part of it was pretty crappy... you could tell the color wasn't retouched. Looked kinda faded and blurry compared to the episode.

Just goes to show that there must be a lot of work involved in re-coloring these old shows that we see on television today. Makes me wonder if any people were ever disappointed with what color tv was like when they would spend so much money on a set.

If you want to experience what color was probably like back then, buying these dollar DVD's would be the way to experience it!

On a side note, this episode of Lucy involves her winning a bunch of prizes from a local department store. One of the prizes is a new color tv. They wheeled it in and it was a rectangular set. Not sure what brand it was... the layout of the front controls didn't look anything like the typical RCA or Zeniths of the time.

[Steve K]

Hi Charlie:

There are probably a lot of people on this forum that can speak for early color tv better than I but I do remember it back to 1966 when we got our first color set. At the time the color seemed fine but of course we could only compare it to the black and white set that we had before. I do remember that we enjoyed the Kraft food commercials as they showed salads and things that had lots of color. I also remember that during football games and such the grass was nice and green on one shot and when they switched to another camera shot it was blue. We did a lot of adjusting the tint control!

Steve

[Celt]

Well to be fair, the original video may have deteriorated with age. But I remember all too well if the incoming signal wasn't perfect, the color picture looked like hell. Many a time I'd relent and turn the color off. We later installed a 30' tower with a rotor and a pre-amplified Winegard antenna. Made a huge difference in both the TV and FM reception.

[Dave S]

Originally Posted by Steve K

At the time the color seemed fine but of course we could only compare it to the black and white set that we had before.

I was a fairly undiscerning viewer as a kid, but I distinctly recall noticing the sometimes blatant banding from the 2" quad playback all the time on shows like Laugh-In and others of that era. I also recall noticing at an early age the wild highlight flares that occasionally appeared in the picture, well before I knew what an Image Orthicon was.

My kids may some day fondly recall today's outrageous lipsync issues with apparently asleep-at-the-wheel technicians having moved their lack of ability or concern into the digital domain.

[Sandy G]

Seems like a lot of the times the colors really weren't all that hot."Dragnet" for example, almost everything was an ugly shade of blue-green. The live shows were better, looked more lifelike, but the canned shows could be all over the map. Then, too, the early color sets didn't have all the color correction gizmos they have now. Some movies color was just plain awful. Everything was WAY too saturated, looked like the colors were painted on.-Sandy G.

[drh4683]

One thing to note, switching from channel to channel on color programs could be totally different as far as tint goes. Transmitters then didnt have as good of toloerance for keeping the color difference signals in the proper phase like they do now.
An example, the zenith space command 600 has the feature to adjust hue. At that time, the hue control was a very muched used knob on the TV. This justified the development of the space command 600 with its hue control capability. Today, one who sees a SC600 thinks why even have hue adjust on the controller? TV transmitters today have such better circuits for error correction making a hue adjustment a one time adjustment on the TV.
The space command 600 remote lasted from 1965-1972. in 1973 The Space command 600ZX was introduced as the replacement and it did not have the hue adjusting capability. TV transmitters improved to the point (around 1973) that the critical hue adjustment from channel to channel was no longer an issue like it once was.

[Steve D.]

Sorry, but to take an 88 cent dvd copy of a 40 year faded Lucy show and use that as the benchmark for early color is ludicrous. Even in the 50's a well set up color set receiving a live color program or even a film show displayed beautiful pictures. I will admit some of the early video tape color broadcasts were terrible looking, and some adjusting of color and tint controls from station to station was necessary, since many of the automatic color corrections we take for granted today were not available on the early receivers. But watching a filmed Bonanza episode in 1959 or a live Perry Como show in 1956 on your new color set was pretty awesome and very natural in living color.

[Eric H]

I suspect a lot those $1 DVD's are made from worn out 16mm prints that would have been used for syndicated reruns originally

Star Trek, and most other 50's-60's shows, were shot on 35mm originally and the studio DVD sets look terrific in B&W or Color.

I think Color may have actually taken a turn for the worse in the late 60's early 70's when they started taping shows. Those early videos look crappy now, even on DVD.

All In The Family is one example I can think of right off.

[Dave S]

Originally Posted by Eric H

I suspect a lot those $1 DVD's are made from worn out 16mm prints that would have been used for syndicated reruns originally

I had the dubious pleasure of seeing a VHS duplication facility many years ago that ran off a lot of the old shows for the cheapie market. I went there because they were selling off a lot of their "surplus" video equipment. One of the no-longer-needed items was a (then) top-of-the-line Merlinized 1" type C video recorder that they dubbed from. As the market soured, they fell on hard times and although they didn't go out of business, they switched to dubbing from 3/4" cassettes. Loss of resolution, huge increase in chroma noise, plus the added fun of a reel change or two in the middle of your movie! Fortunately a lot of their product was black and white.

[orthophonic]

Those dollar dvds ( I have some) are made from old
transfers to 3/4" tape of worn and faded 16MM syndication prints. They are not what it would
have looked like back then when they would have
broadcast a new 35MM print from an RCA film chain.
The Star Trek is a good example, the old VHS tapes
were mastered from 16MM syndication prints, the
new DVD releases were mastered from the original
35MM interpositives. Most movies are also mastered
from the interpositive. Current network film shows
are mastered from the camera negative transferred and
color corrected to digital tape for editing and then
broadcast.
I am a Telecine Colorist and do this everyday.

[andy]

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[roundscreen]

Charlie If you want to know what color tv was like in the 60s check out tv land on cable. The color on the old tv shows loooks the same as it did back then. I watched alot of them on my grand parents rca when i was a kid. They did have a big antenna on the house with a rotor. That set had a great picture even in b-w.

[Celt]

You know, I definately remember a turn for the worse in audio and video quality of the shows from the early to mid 70's. As mentioned, video tape was probably the culprit. But I also feel that the producers and engineers no longer cared about good audio too.

[old_tv_nut]

Not only is 35mm a good idea, it should be fine-grain 35mm. When we were experimenting with HD captures of 35mm for the FCC ACATS (Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services), we had a short piece of "Murder She Wrote", and the film grain was annoying in HD. These days, CBS is demanding all filmed productions be in high-quality 35mm.

Also, not to be mean, but Angela L. needed more makeup in HD.

And a third thing - we found we couldn't use the clip because it wasn't framed for 16x9 ratio. There was one scene where the bad guy and Angela are talking, and we couldn't understand the gist of the conversation until we looked at the complete 4x3 frame, and the baddie was holding a gun, just below the bottom of the 16x9 cropped picture! The framing would allow showing either the gun or their heads, but not both!

I appear in the opening title sequence of some episodes of Murder She Wrote as a cop struggling with a prisoner as me and another cop escort him up a long series of steps in front of a supposed police station.

Put *that* in your crack pipe and smoke it!

As for sound quality on 70's variety shows....they all seemed to share the exact same sweetening (laughter, audience sounds, etc) and were horrendously overdone. There were always some cat-call whistles thrown in for further annoyance. Who recalls that?

Anthony