What did broadcast color television look like in 1954 through 1957?

[old_coot88]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Yeah, B/W signals viewed on one of the early roundies looked worser than Death " eatin' a Cracker." Those ugly purplish/green outlines on EVERYTHING were pretty bad.

Yes, back in the early days of color, it was common for BW programming to be transmitted "in color". That is, even when the pic material was BW, the chroma carrier and burst were still being transmitted. This kept the chroma chain in the TV receiver switched 'on', allowing color artifacts to appear on the BW image. You had to turn the color control all the way down to get rid of them.

Sets had an automatic 'color killer' circuit, but it depended on the absence of the burst signal.

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by old_coot88

Yes, back in the early days of color, it was common for BW programming to be transmitted "in color". That is, even when the pic material was BW, the chroma carrier and burst were still being transmitted. This kept the chroma chain in the TV receiver switched 'on', allowing color artifacts to appear on the BW image. You had to turn the color control all the way down to get rid of them.

Sets had an automatic 'color killer' circuit, but it depended on the absence of the burst signal.

Probably why Zeniths had a push pull manual color killer assist switch on the chroma level knob for the first several years of roundys.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

Probably why Zeniths had a push pull manual color killer assist switch on the chroma level knob for the first several years of roundys.

I also suspect there were cases where sets were used with deep fringe area signals, so the automatic color killer could be set to favor "color on" so that the color wouldn't flash on and off while the user "enjoyed" a very snowy color signal. The color could then be turned off on a known black and white signal.

I wonder how many calls there were to dealers/repair shops to complain of "no color" because the switch had been turned off.