Restoring a RCA 21CT55

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UPDATE, APRIL 24, 2019

Is this cheating?

The dilemma for a photographer is how to capture a properly exposed vintage television cabinet without over exposing the television image on the screen! One method is to minimize the room lighting so that the cabinet can be seen, but reduce the light reaching the display surface. This is a compromise at best, as the image will be noisy from low light (unless you have a high quality camera for low light situations) and the display still won’t be properly exposed. I like to see a properly exposed color image and to do that, I usually shoot my screenshots in darkness. Many people prefer to see the cabinet with the display on even though the color image is compromised.

So, we did an experiment. I set up my Sony A6300 on a tripod in a fixed position so that the cabinet of our RCA 21CT55 would be fully resolved in natural daylight without flash. For the first shot, the FL was 16mm, aperture 3.5, SS 1/50 second, auto white balance. It was 4PM, April 23, 2019, cloudy sky, television off.

For the screenshots, we closed the shutters, turned off the lights and the room was dark. The camera, still in its same position on the tripod was ready to take the screenshots. We turned on the television and let it run for 15 minutes as the circuits needed to stabilize with a nice bright, well focused display. (We previously calibrated the set and the set received a full alignment.) We set the aperture to 7.1 which closely matched the brightness on the display. We shot about 35 screenshot images.

The next step was to cut and paste the selected screenshots. This was done the hard way as we do not have Photoshop and all editing was done on my iPad Pro 2, 10.5 which is speced out for 98% DCI-3 color space. What we needed was to “cut out” only the properly exposed screenshots shot in darkness from the black surrounds. Since both the daylight and dark shots were taken from the same vantage point on the tripod, the screenshot images once cut, would paste nicely over the screen on the daylight shot of the cabinet.

The results can be seen below. Not a professional job, but okay. Now we can see the properly exposed cabinet and screenshots together with no compromise. I recall this procedure was a topic in a thread at Videokarma, where it was thought an image on a prototype Pye Chromatron was fake.

So this experiment was to show what can be done without faking the photography. The only adjustments made were to cut, paste and to crop the images to center the 21CT55 within the images. There are two non cropped images below. Full resolution shots can be seen at this link: https://visions4netjournal.com/vinta...tv-page-two-2/