Real Date of Australian Color Intro?

[Aussie Bloke]

As it's been mentioned 1st March 1975 was the official opening date for colour television in Australia and adding to that ALL programs were made in colour from that day forth. All TV stations in Australia had colour cameras outfitted in their studios leading up to the official opening date. From then on only programs shown in B&W were reruns of older programs made prior to colour.

Of course colour television experimentation in Australia date back to the very early 60s.

From what I learned, the earliest use of colour over here I know of is in 1960 St Vincent Hospital Melbourne got themselves Marconi BD848 colour camera (like the RCA TK-41) from Smith, Kline & French company for closed circuit colour monitoring of surgery on patients. A photo of the camera in action can be seen here http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/a...e&usePid2=true .

Then around 1963/64 EMI 204 vidicon colour cameras were used to demonstrate colour television at Sydney Showgrounds.

There has also been some colour television experimentation going on at amateur television stations during the mid/late 60s as well, most notably at an amateur TV station in South Australia. One of my contacts who was part of that station actually built a field sequential colour television system a bit like CBS's having a colour wheel in front of an image orthicon camera and one in front of a B&W monitor, also he built a 3 tube colour vidicon camera and a colour telecine of similar nature. He kindly sent me a film compile of various footage of the station from that era and I've uploaded it to YouTube for all to see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbAhNpHOXg4 in the film footage you'll see the colour telecine in action displaying Goofy "Motor Mania" cartoon.

In 1967 a RCA TK-42 was brought to ATV-0 in Australia to televise the Pakenham horse races which the picture was broadcasted in B&W but viewed in NTSC colour on the control room monitors. Details of this even can be seen in RCA Broadcast News issue 138 starting at page 32 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/...ws/RCA-138.pdf .

In 1968 HSV-7 did a PAL colour demonstration at the Royal Melbourne Show using I guess Philips LDK3 plumbicon colour cameras, the demonstration fortunately survives on colour videotape and excerpts of it can be seen on YouTube in the following links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjiAprY1JuU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaZivUNdtbc .

And other colour demonstrations were made during the late 60s and colour videotapings were made of some shows in the early 70s as well.

Colour broadcasts actually began on an experimental sporadic basis starting around 19th October 1974 up to the official switch over date of 1st March 1975.