High Performance B&W TV

[wa2ise]

An issue to contend with in the later 50's is that the B&W TV designers would limit the video bandwidth to suppress the NTSC color chroma subcarrier. That subcarrier ranging from about 2MHz and up. The chroma subcarrier would appear, on high resolution early B&W sets, as a crawling fine checkerboard pattern in highly saturated color areas of the picture.

Usually, they used the response of the IF strip to do the above chroma subcarrier supression.

One high performance feature that most every TV set manufacturer left out was DC restoration. Without DC restoration, a night scene (picture being mostly dark) the blacks go gray after the TV show switches from a bright sunny day (lots of white in the picture). Most color TVs did have this feature, as gray dark colored areas look really awful, washed out looking. For some reason this doesn't look quite as awful in B&W.