Dwight Eisenhower dedication to WRC-TV May 22 1958 presentation available on Veoh.com

[Sandy G]

Something I've often noticed is how much BETTER color TV pictures looked than corresponding B&W ones did...Even the earliest ones like this, seemed so much more "stable", & less prone to overloading from light sources, reflections, etc, & didn't have that harsh, stark, "Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy" look to them.. and no, I don't think its that B&W was for the most part recorded on "kinescopes", either... It's a subtle thing,& kinda hard to describe...

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Something I've often noticed is how much BETTER color TV pictures looked than corresponding B&W ones did...Even the earliest ones like this, seemed so much more "stable", & less prone to overloading from light sources, reflections, etc, & didn't have that harsh, stark, "Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy" look to them.. and no, I don't think its that B&W was for the most part recorded on "kinescopes", either... It's a subtle thing,& kinda hard to describe...

As has been discussed somewhere else on the forum, a good part of this is due to running the image orthicons "below the knee" in the color cameras plus using gamma corrector circuits in the color cameras.

Black and white cameras depended on an approximate gamma correction from the effect of secondary electron redistribution in the image orthicon, which resulted in bright objects being surrounded with a dark halo, and dark objects having a washed-out central area away from the edges. This wouldn't do for color, because, for example, a red object would have a cyan halo. This same kind of charge redistribution occurred in early Xerox machines, hence the "copy of a copy" look.