1954 Color TV ID

[old_tv_nut]

The Trinitron originally and for a long time had a coarse grill that would produce terrible moire patterns with 3.58 MHz color subcarrier dots. The video response was strongly filtered to remove any signal above 3 MHz [edit: or maybe less]. The sets, however, did have a very good luminance transient response with carefully phase equalized, equal, preshoots and overshoots. This produced a "sharp," "clean" picture, but not a high-resolution one. TV stations loved them for at least two reasons: they eliminated any video noise above 3 MHz, and, at the time, they had the brightest pictures of any monitors, which facilitated using them for pictures visible to the camera on a set.

As a side note, Tektronix had a program to develop a monitor that had a very small spot size, fine dot pitch, and luma response out to the limit of broadcast cameras (way beyond the 4.2 MHz broadcast signal limit.) The raster lines were clearly visible, much like a monochrome tube. When they showed it to network engineers, the project was shut down, because the studio people hated it.