1960s: Magnavox ATC - Automatic Tint Control

[NewVista]

I have a 1969 Magnavox full-line television brochure. They are touting the "new ATC Automatic Tint Control that, at last, solves any issue with flesh tones, in every picture, on any channel!"
How did it work?

[old_tv_nut]

Magnavox used the simplest kind of "automatic tint." It changed the demodulation angles and gains such that green and purple saturation was reduced, so hues were pushed towards skin tone or cyan. Some Magnavox sets in the 60s also had a switch to change the CRT tracking from neutral to sepia. When combined, they resulted in a "tan cowboy on a brown horse riding into an orange sunset" look to the picture.

[NewVista]

Oh my, not so good. The brochure also talks up their new MX500 picture tube.

[zeno]

Yup. Up here it was known as the "brownalator switch".
Everyone eventually came up with an auto color scheme.
I always turned them off & touched things up for the content.
Dont know about the CRT. The only development around
that time was Zenith chromacolor black matrix CRT's. IIRC
Maggy used RCA jugs as a rule.

73 Zeno
LFOD !

[timberstx]

We had that set when was growing up. It did produce a good picture and flesh tones were good. It was hard to adjust the tint and not have good flesh tones. But as mentioned before our set did not produce greens very well. But at the time we did not know what we were missing until you saw another set that did not have that feature. And not knowing turning it off would have improved overall picture.
After the picture tube got to dark to see, my mom went and bought another Magnavox in 1980. It was a bottom of the line 25 inch videomatic. Which did not change the color like auto tint. It was more like a lower gear to make adjustment easier.
With the newer set all the colors were there, but the older one seemed to have better flesh tones.

[NewVista]

In this newly found 1969 line brochure, they have their flagship Astro-Sonic combo ($1195 list) that appears to have 25"? squarer tube - "295 sq.in." they say, not stating diagonal measure.

I once had an earlier iteration of the Astro-Sonic running (magnificent woodwork) - 23", rounder, with green escutcheon, pre 'MX500' tube series?. It had a warm yellow/red phosphor character and also had Auto Tint via a slide switch on rear thumbwheel presets. They couldn't have been too proud of the Auto Tint hiding it at the back?

[old_tv_nut]

Or maybe it was a way to avoid redesigning the front panel to hold extra controls?

[reeferman]

How did ATC work? Non-technically speaking, not to well at all.

RCA introduced ATC on their CTC-39. Ugh.

As I recall, the Maggies also had their sepia switch (I hated it) on those sets too. Maybe not. Either way, double ugh.

Kudos to Wayne for the excellent description...""tan cowboy on a brown horse riding into an orange sunset" look to the picture".

[damen]

RCA even recommended in the customer instruction book that if "enhanced" greens are desired, Auto color should be turned off.