Still a mystery to me

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by Dave A

The common thread was someone had to have money for one of these things and they were generally 50+ and scared to turn a knob on the set. I figured out these sets quickly and was the brave one to move the knobs while the elders were panicking.

Originally Posted by Steve McVoy

They were rarely set up correctly

Combine these two, and you have exactly my experiences. My grandmother got a color TV set for her 80th birthday in 1974, and she was the first to have one in my immediate family. After seeing color TV sets in various other places, the first thing I found out with my grandmother's set is that you could adjust it to get REAL color, not "color TV color". She did not like the way I set it up, though, so I made sure to put it back to "the color TV look" for her when I was done watching it. Her set had the "one-button color" feature, so I set that to her preferences and left the manual controls set to an accurate picture.

Too many people in the early days seemed to "want to get their money's worth" from a color TV set it seems, for lack of a better term.