The "cheap" TV's had a great picture too......

[oldtvman]

Originally Posted by nasadowsk

This brings up an interesting question - did anyone in the US public at the time even REALIZE that all color TV sets were more or less exactly the same, and that all the advertised 'color guard' and all gimmicks were basically nothing?

Just as now most people don't grasp the concept of HD, nor do they know what it takes to actually watch HD. When I worked at Circuit City, people would buy HD monitors and hook them to cable and wonder why the picture looked worse than it did on their analog sets. Basically color was the same way. Unless you had a trained eye most people couldn't tell the difference between one set and the other. Up until the time when the auto color features came in, I remember going to peoples homes and the flesh tones weren't set properly and the color was run almost all the way up.