Do "roundie" color sets make a better picture than later sets?

[etype2]

To my eye this image is much better then the first Sony image. It still looks blue. I'd guess about 7700 to 8000K. It definitely does not look to be 6500K. I still see the basket weave artifacts in the background. Is the Sony generating the artifacts? My iPad is measured at 7041K and could be showing the image bluer then it is.

I have been watching ISF calibrated television images since the late 90's. I am used to seeing proper color temperature.

[lnx64]

Call me crazy, but I like using Disneys Bolt. The simulated backdrops, vibrant but balanced colors. Real good.

[dtvmcdonald]

I think you see it right. The Sony was set for one step too cool.

The weave pattern is caused because I did not quite blur out all the
pixel pattern of either set since I wanted as much detail as possible.
The Sony is not generating the artifact.

Its possible to do it right but a pain!

The CT-100 CAN generate moire artifacts because the focus is
so good that lines can be narrower than the pixel pitch. However,
its not showing in these pics.

[Eric H]

Originally Posted by tvcollector

The wizard of oz was redone in color back in the early days of color TV,

Negative, the WOO was always in color, Three Strip Technicolor in fact.

It has been restored in later years using modern technology to get the most out of it but it's always been a color film.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

... I don't like (makes my eyes tired) the flashing nature of image refresh in a flat screen (versus the soft fade of a CRT),

I'm afraid you have it backwards. Flat screen sets (particularly LCDs) display each image continuously; CRTs flash due to the persistence of the phosphor being (sort of) exponential. (Actually, phosphors typically have a main decay that is very rapid compared to field scan rate, but also have an extended low-level tail-off that can produce visible smear of bright objects against a black background; but the major effect by far is the fast drop-off.) Hence, in 50 Hz countries, flicker was always visible on CRTs, not so on LCDs. This characteristic of LCDs also caused smeared motion, alleviated in recent models by going to 120 Hz or 240 Hz refresh rates.
Plasma TVs and micromirror devices get their gray scale by duty cycle modulation, which can cause some artifacts when there is motion present or when the eyeball scans across the image quickly.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by NowhereMan 1966

...
I think I read somewhere the roundies used a rare Earth element to produce reds in better quality, yittrium, IIRC but they switched over to something else when the rectangular sets came out and the phosphor leaned more towards a red/orange.

Phosphor history has been discussed in several threads here, but rather than searching for all that (you can do it), let me summarize:

Earliest regularly used phosphor set - 15GP22 - had a very inefficient red, a medium efficiency green (P1 oscilloscope green, in other words, the NTSC spec, not as yellow as current phosphors), and the NTSC blue, which was more cyan and less deep violet blue than today's phosphors. RCA and NTSC would have liked a deeper blue, but there was a problem with copper contamination that prevented using a deep sulfide blue - copper would turn it green.

The first really major change in phosphors was the all-sulfide tubes in the early 60's. These are the ones you see with a greenish face. This included a deeper-blue zinc sulfide phosphor (silver activated) since the copper problems had been solved, and a zinc sulfide green (copper activated) that was yellower than "NTSC green" and therefore brighter, and a zinc cadmium-sulfide red that was much brighter than the old red, but was slightly more orange at low current and still more orange at high current.

The next innovations were rare earth reds, which came very close to NTSC red. Note that NTSC red is actually somewhat on the orange side. For example, traffic signal red is outside the NTSC gamut. First was a vanadate red, then europium oxy-sulfide, which became the defacto red for a long time. From this point on, the differences in color renditions in different sets had more to do with different designs of the color matrix to compensate for the yellower green and deeper blue than it had to do with differences in phosphor primary colors. (There were some tubes that added a bit of cadmium to the green, making it even more yellowish and still brighter. In the 70's cadmium was removed due to environmental concerns.)

PAL, and later HDTV, came in after this phosphor set was established, so the color matrixing could be done at the camera on linear signals (where it should be), instead of the approximations in the receiver that NTSC set makers had been fooling with for years. This phosphor set was standardized in several very similar color specs for different applications until they were combined into the specs now used for HDTV and still camera sRGB.

Flat panels are now being designed (and a few produced) that can produce a greater color gamut, some equaling the old NTSC gamut or more, and specs are being developed for extended color gamut signals to drive these displays correctly.

Edit: Yes, yttrium was somewhere in the red phosphor work too, I've forgotten the exact sequence.

[tvcollector]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

Do you have any suggestions? I really don't see what's wrong with using The Wizard of Oz - can't think of any particular thing that would be obviously superior, but if you have something in mind, please tell us.

Anything more modern, a choice made by a user.. There's plenty of movies made within the last 10 years or so.. If it were up to me, Id probably do screen shots of current television programing, maybe The Ellen DeGeneres Show for example..

[rca2000]

Originally Posted by Eric H

Negative, the WOO was always in color, Three Strip Technicolor in fact.

It has been restored in later years using modern technology to get the most out of it but it's always been a color film.

MOST of it anyway...after the "house explodes".

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by tvcollector

Anything more modern, a choice made by a user.. There's plenty of movies made within the last 10 years or so.. If it were up to me, Id probably do screen shots of current television programing, maybe The Ellen DeGeneres Show for example..

Live stuff would be OK, but using WOO allows us to go back to previous posts with something comparable. Recent movies are definitely a bad idea. Their color is always adjusted to fit the director's artistic vision, usually in ways that restrict the color palette and give a general tint to the color balance. (More often than not, this is a restriction to the cyan/orange axis, with an over-all bluish caste, as making everything green or magenta would just look weird.) I get as sick of seeing this overdone as you do of seeing WOO.

[dtvmcdonald]

Yttrium has nothing to do with color. Its also not a rare earth,
but rather one slot up in the periodic table from the rare earths.
It has 3+ ions as do the rare earths and it has a similar size,
so it makes a great matrix for doping with rare earths.

[dtvmcdonald]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

Live stuff would be OK, but using WOO allows us to go back to previous posts with something comparable. Recent movies are definitely a bad idea. Their color is always adjusted to fit the director's artistic vision, usually in ways that restrict the color palette and give a general tint to the color balance. (More often than not, this is a restriction to the cyan/orange axis, with an over-all bluish caste, as making everything green or magenta would just look weird.) I get as sick of seeing this overdone as you do of seeing WOO.

I was looking at new movies last night looking for nice scenes to use,
mainly the Tolkien and Harry Potter ones. There are few scenes that
don't have seriously manipulated color, except some at the
start of LOTR.

In LOTR Fellowship of the Ring, near the end are scenes where they
are floating down the river Anduin. And these scenes are seriously green:
blue-green water and lots of greenish backgrounds. That's on my Sony.
On the CT-100, when set so color bars and Dorothy's face look perfect,
the darker areas, green on the Sony, are blue instead. This is visible
also in the white parts of Dorothy's collar, which are blue instead of
gray. I though this might be caused by a wrong I gain, so I checked ...
nope, that's not it. Could it be a bad resistor in the blue color matrix?
I was sure that I had them right when I set it up, but only checked
saturated color bars.

Fifth Element may have some good scenes.

[Pete Deksnis]

Originally Posted by dtvmcdonald

On the CT-100, when set so color bars and Dorothy's face look perfect,
the darker areas, green on the Sony, are blue instead.

A couple of years ago I noticed the same problem with my CT-100 in a background that changed from red to green behind Rita Hayworth in the 1944 3-strip film 'Cover Girl'. It's relatively early in the film when she's in make-up. Some guys carry no-seam behind her that changes abruptly to green. My CT-100 changed from red to blue.

The fix was a very exacting recalibration of the quadrature transformer.

Pete

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by dtvmcdonald

Yttrium has nothing to do with color. Its also not a rare earth,
but rather one slot up in the periodic table from the rare earths.
It has 3+ ions as do the rare earths and it has a similar size,
so it makes a great matrix for doping with rare earths.

Thanks - had no time to look it up and refresh my memory.

[etype2]

Folks, post your best roundie screenshots. I will in kind, try to post comparable screenshots from my calibrated Sharp Quatron 70 inch LCD. If you are unbiased, it could be interesting :-)

[Eric H]

Originally Posted by etype2

Folks, post your best roundie screenshots. I will in kind, try to post comparable screenshots from my calibrated Sharp Quatron 70 inch LCD. If you are unbiased, it could be interesting :-)

That's a bit unfair comparing to HD, I think the OP meant later CRT sets?