early color wanna be's

[oldtvman]

I see some of the older sets popping up from time to time like Philco-fords, Motorola and Admirals. Those sets were never able to produce the color quality of the Zenith's or Rca's. The sets I'm speaking of were sets of their own design. The Motorola's always had a soft picture and orangey red's. The Admirals were somewhat worse than the Motorola's as far as color reproduction. The Philco-Fords again had trouble reproducing accurate color. I guess most people wouldn't really see the difference but for us tech's the differences were pretty striking.

[radiotvnut]

I think you're right about people not seeing the difference. I've known people to watch color TV's that were obviously not working properly and the set owner just went on about how good a picture it had. I've had TV's for sale and the buyer would take the TV with the worst picture.

[AU20K]

Speaking of color wanna bee's, do any of you remember the plastic stickon sheets you put over the black and white tv screens? They were blue at the top for sky, brownish in the middle for skin tones and green at the bottom for vegetation. When I was a little kid, I remember my grandmother had one of those and even at the age of 8 or 9, I thought that was totally f - - - ed up. Kinda a cool memory now though.

[Cleve]

Originally Posted by AU20K

Speaking of color wanna bee's, do any of you remember the plastic stickon sheets you put over the black and white tv screens? They were blue at the top for sky, brownish in the middle for skin tones and green at the bottom for vegetation. When I was a little kid, I remember my grandmother had one of those and even at the age of 8 or 9, I thought that was totally f - - - ed up. Kinda a cool memory now though.

My god - I remember those now- I hadn't thought about them in years. I never saw one, but I saw them advertised and the idea seemed completely stupid. Color was SO expensive back then, it was the reason such alternatives existed.

[Jeffhs]

I never saw the stick-on sheets being used as a cheap and dirty attempt at making a color picture from a b&w one (from what I've heard, it only works with one picture and makes everything else look awful), but I have known people who obviously don't care about the looks of their color picture. I guess some people are like that; they don't give a hoot what the picture looks like, as long as it's there. Many people never learned how to adjust the color controls properly to get a good picture (some even watched color shows in b&w for months or years, unaware that a simple twist of the wrist on the fine tuning would bring the color in as nice as you please), which is likely why auto-color controls activated by a button on the front panel began appearing on TVs by about the '70s. These buttons did not, as a rule, activate actual automatic color correction systems (though there were exceptions, such as Magnavox's Chromatic, Zenith's Color Sentry, et al.), but rather switched in controls that were factory-preset (often using a color bar pattern from a generator, not a broadcast signal) for a pleasing picture. The purpose of these so-called "auto-color" schemes was to reset the color, tint, etc. to some semblance of normal after the set's front-panel color controls were misadjusted by curious children (for example).

True automatic color correction began to appear in certain makes of TVs in the '70s as well. Zenith had a system it called Color Sentry, Magnavox had several in addition to the Chromatic button (which was probably little more than a switch to patch in preset color/tint controls), RCA had ColorTrak, GE had a short-lived system it called VIR, and the list goes on. Today's "set and forget" (take them out of the box, connect antenna or cable, plug it in, turn it on and enjoy) color sets are remarkably stable as far as color rendition goes, however, even though the circuitry involved in the color corrections goes unnamed. (As several of you have mentioned in this thread, however, the "orangey reds" and other color distortion you, as trained television technicians, might notice in a color picture on modern sets will almost always go unnoticed by casual viewers.)

My eight-year-old RCA CTC185 19" set makes a beautiful picture on Time Warner digital cable; as a rule it needs no adjustments to color or tint--the auto-color system in this set is that good. The picture on my set is so good right now, IMHO, that I am eagerly looking forward to the end of analog next year (it might as well be over now as far as Time-Warner is concerned, as they rebuilt their entire system some time ago; it is now 100-percent digital). I'll be eager to see what digital TV looks like compared to the analog system it will replace, even though I will still see the digital pictures on my 4:3 analog set in letterbox format--unless, of course, the converter box Time-Warner may put on my set when the standards change (I already have a box from TW, when it was Comcast, which is clearly marked "digital cable" on the front panel, so I don't know if they will change it or not) has a button on the remote to activate circuitry which will expand a 16:9 picture to fill the screen of an analog set. However, with the zoom function comes a potential problem: viewers may and probably will notice that part of the top and bottom of the picture will be cut off with the zoom activated. This is normal and is to be expected, but I would guess that most people won't notice the difference (or will shrug it off and tolerate it if they do notice) until or unless they eventually get a flat-panel high-definition TV monitor or receiver.

[mr_fixer]

I've known a few people who are like that, I think my aunt and uncle were like that. They were perfectly content to watch people with grinch green or purple grape faces. I once corrected the tint control on their set and they never reacted to it. I guess with some people they might as well be watching an aquarium with a radio attached. Logan

[Celt]

Originally Posted by mr_fixer

I've known a few people who are like that, I think my aunt and uncle were like that. They were perfectly content to watch people with grinch green or purple grape faces. I once corrected the tint control on their set and they never reacted to it. I guess with some people they might as well be watching an aquarium with a radio attached. Logan

The same people who think plastic stereos from Wal-Mart sound good.

[oldtvman]

I worked on just about every brand set out there maybe with the exception of Olympia, which was never sold in our markets. My point was the Motorola's, Admiral's and others couldn't hold a candle to Rca, Zenith and all the Rca clones out there. And believe me I tried to make some of those sets look good but without much success.

[stromberg6]

Those plastic sheets show up on epay from time to time. Still stupid, but now a collector's item.
Kevin

[andy]

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[oldtvman]

Originally Posted by andy

You're right about RCA and Zenith being hard to beat. I'm just finishing up a 1968 Toshiba, and while it looks good, it just doesn't have the same pleasing rich color of RCA and Zenith. By the 70's most manufacturers had caught up. I guess IC based color decoders were more likely to be well designed than tube circuits.

A lot of those so called auto color systems actually distort the color decoding so that flesh tones look more natural over a wider range. It does make the setting of the tint control less critical, but it also makes the color less accurate. I always turn off the auto color on any sets that have them. It's not needed with today's stable broadcasts. Even my vintage TVs rarely require adjustment.

Your right Andy, once color and electronics in general entered the solid state era, although there were differences between brands as time went on and you didn't really know who made what, the differences seemed to evaporate.

I'm sure that for most of the guys on this forum if we were around during the time when some of these beauties were brand new, we could have eeked a good picture out of most of them. The problem early on was people with color sets didn't really know how to adjust them, and most of the techs of that era were'nt a lot of help, with the exception of the factory trained techs.

[t0nito]

Good thing we in "PAL" land don't need or have any tint controls. Colour is natural as it should be...

[tubesrule]

Originally Posted by t0nito

Good thing we in "PAL" land don't need or have any tint controls. Colour is natural as it should be...

Although PAL does correct for phase errors, it comes at a substantial cost. The phase errors are replaced with saturation errors, which if bad enough become Hanover Bars, and the PAL system cuts the vertical color resolution in half. With the stability of modern equipment, NTSC can actually provide a better color picture.

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by tubesrule

Although PAL does correct for phase errors, it comes at a substantial cost. The phase errors are replaced with saturation errors, which if bad enough become Hanover Bars, and the PAL system cuts the vertical color resolution in half. With the stability of modern equipment, NTSC can actually provide a better color picture.

You should not forget that the stability of modern equipment does also reduce saturation errors of the PAL system. But the halved vertical color resolution is the disadvantage of PAL. Especially when you watch a video recording of a PAL broadcasting.

But on the other hand, the color subcarrier of PAL is 4.43 MHz, the color subcarrier of NTSC is only 3.58 MHz. PAL does provide a much larger video bandwidth, and together with 25 frames per second, while NTSC has nearly 30 frames per second, the horizontal resolution is much better than with NTSC.

If you watch the same video content with a PAL and with a NTSC receiver, you will find the PAL display much sharper and detailed than the NTSC display. On the other hand, with larger displays, you can notice more flicker with PAL.

The color reproduction of NTSC with a proper adjusted NTSC color tv set might be much better than with a PAL set due to the higher color resolution.

- Eckhard

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by yagosaga

You should not forget that the stability of modern equipment does also reduce saturation errors of the PAL system. But the halved vertical color resolution is the disadvantage of PAL. Especially when you watch a video recording of a PAL broadcasting.

But on the other hand, the color subcarrier of PAL is 4.43 MHz, the color subcarrier of NTSC is only 3.58 MHz. PAL does provide a much larger video bandwidth, and together with 25 frames per second, while NTSC has nearly 30 frames per second, the horizontal resolution is much better than with NTSC.

If you watch the same video content with a PAL and with a NTSC receiver, you will find the PAL display much sharper and detailed than the NTSC display. On the other hand, with larger displays, you can notice more flicker with PAL.

The color reproduction of NTSC with a proper adjusted NTSC color tv set might be much better than with a PAL set due to the higher color resolution.

- Eckhard

I'd like to see the difference myself, although I do believe you are correct, but I just never saw a 625 line, 25 frames a second, PAL or SECAM color picture in my life so I would like to experience it. One of my buddies studied in France (of course they use SECAM) for a year at the University of Strasbourg and I asked him, "what the picture quality is like." He basically said the same as you, you do have a higher resolution with some flicker but he though colors were more or less the same. Then again, this is SECAM and he joked, "well, I didn't go to France to watch TV." I've heard stories where to synchronize films to European TV, sometimes they would run the films at 25 frames a second instead of 24 and to some ears, you can tell the difference with the slightly higher pitch in the soundtrack.