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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Early Admirals I remember copied a lot from RCA, so the color should have been similar (if the picture tubes were).

Later sets without a named automatic color correction and no auto switch generally do not have an auto color circuit of the types that were touted so loudly, but will have a matrix in the demodulator to give an approximate correction for modern phosphors. As stated above, the auto color buttons generally did two things - 1) go to preset controls; and 2) distort colors so that anything near fleshtone became fleshtone. Different circuits also tended to distort other colors to a greater or lesser degree depending on their sophistication. The simplest just changed the demodulator phases so that greens and magentas were suppressed. The Magnavox was like that - "the tan cowboy on a brown horse riding through brown sagebrush into the orange and cyan sunset." The RCA was more sophisticated in that it only affected hues near flesh tone and left the pure greens, cyans, blues, and purples alone. However, it also invoked an averaging color level adjustment, so low-saturation pix got boosted and high-saturation pix got paler. This failed very visibly when the scene switched to a shot of someone in a bright red shirt or dress - all the colors got pale. Zenith used a combination of changing the demod angles and a non-linear chroma amplifier to tone down only the over-saturated areas. All of the above became less and less necessary as broadcasts became more uniform and receivers became more stable.

Now manufacturers are putting all sorts of special modes ("cinema" "sports" etc.) into expensive plasma and LCD sets. My opinion is that it's more hype creep for the unknowing buying public, but once one brand starts it the others need to follow - just give me a straight calibrated monitor setting, please!

I looked at the "picture quality" menu of my RCA CTC185 last night and noticed that the "auto color" menu option was set to off--probably has been off for some time. I would never have known had I not looked at the setting, as my TV picture looks as good as it always has. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I could not notice any difference in picture quality whether or not the auto color was on, so I just left it set to off and haven't touched it since (I must have forgotten when I switched the option off in the first place); as noted, there really is no need for such correction schemes in this age of nearly rock-stable TV signals from modern cable systems, and the improved color circuitry in the TV receivers themselves. It is little wonder no one much bothers with putting auto-color controls in TVs these days; the closest I've seen to any kind of color correction in today's flat-screen CRT TVs (RCA/Thomson's SDTVs come to mind) is a menu with four options: news, movie, sports, cinema. These probably switch in preset controls that alter the demodulator settings for these types of programming; having had no experience with this type of sophisticated color processing, I'm not sure I want to guess more than I already have at how it works. As stated above, however, these preset controls are probably just sales points for the sets and can be ignored if desired. After having read the post describing how the various color control schemes worked, I think most people just left the preset button set to off and didn't give it a second thought; the TV actually made a better picture with the control off anyhow.

BTW, did anyone here ever have any experience with General Electric TVs of the '70s that had a color correction system known as VIR? This system supposedly worked with a signal broadcast by TV stations and networks in the vertical blanking interval and was supposed to keep the colors balanced, as did the other systems mentioned in this thread. Was VIR actually as good as GE supposedly claimed it was, or was it little better (or even worse) than, say, Zenith's Color Sentry or Magnavox's Videomatic?

The mode settings on the new sets just switch in different presets of color, tint, brightness, contrast, etc. You can manually set each one and get the same effect. GE's VIR system was one of those things that worked well in theory on paper, but didn't work well in the real world. For one thing the brodcasting station had to broadcast the vir signal which would be generated by the originating station, maybe. Often it was lost in the network relays, or tweeked along the way, so it just wasn't much use. I have seen sets with worse pictures with VIR on than off.

Bill R

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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.

This is for Jeff: The VIR signal you're talking about was usually generated at the station or mastering house using a Tektronix 1441 VIR signal Deleter/Inserter. The signal could be inserted on line 19 or 20 to give an absolute reference for amplitude and phase characteristics of a color TV program or recording. The signal placed a sample subcarrier burst of 40 IRE at 70% video level followed by a sample unmodulated 50% video pulse on the selected line. The receiver could use these two samples to lock the color reception of the set without worry about transmission distortions which might occur at or near "0" IRE where line burst reference is placed in NTSC. In essence the VIR signal was placed well above sync/subcarrier and the potential distortions which can occur in analog broadcasting.

The original thought with VIR was that it could be inserted early in the signal path and allow correction for all that happened along the way. But then people started to reinsert it along the way, and I believe, even just before the transmitter so that it could be used to adjust the transmitter. Of course, it had no relation to all the preceding distortions then, and became useless in a consumer set. I remember doing competitive analysis of a GE set some time after VIR had been around for a while, and much of the time you would prefer to turn it off.

[EDIT - I mean turn off the VIR - but maybe you would prefer to turn off the set too! :D ]

The original thought with VIR was that it could be inserted early in the signal path and allow correction for all that happened along the way. But then people started to reinsert it along the way, and I believe, even just before the transmitter so that it could be used to adjust the transmitter. Of course, it had no relation to all the preceding distortions then, and became useless in a consumer set. I remember doing competitive analysis of a GE set some time after VIR had been around for a while, and much of the time you would prefer to turn it off.

[EDIT - I mean turn off the VIR - but maybe you would prefer to turn off the set too! :D ]

My great-uncle had a GE TV with VIR in the early 1970s--the first television with that feature I ever saw in my life (haven't seen another since, even on eBay). I don't honestly know, however, if he even knew the feature was there. This frequently happens with functions on TVs such as auto-color, VIR and the like--people just turn on the set and watch their programs, with little or no regard for those extra buttons, knobs, etc. for other functions (this also applies to Sears Silvertone's "Chromix" control on a few of their higher-end sets of the '60s-'70s that was supposed to inject a soft blue hue into monochrome pictures; most people simply set the control to black and white and forgot about it). It's just as well; most auto-color correction schemes didn't work all that well, as has been discussed in this thread previously.

Most if not all color televisions worked better with these systems turned off and disregarded, anyway. I shut off the auto-color control on my RCA CTC185 some time ago as it isn't needed, given today's rock-stable chroma circuits in the sets themselves (all televisions manufactured in the last decade or so, not just RCAs) and the vastly improved stability of the signals from TV stations, especially if you are on cable.

Did anyone even insert the VIR signal? Does anyone even do it anymore?

Not to incite the debate between PAL and NTSC, just remember, People Are Lavender.

With digital processing and transport in the signal path to the average consumer receiver, NTSC is vastly better than in the past.

I can't however stand artifacts of digital compression. Don't even get me started on message crawls and dogs/bugs on the bottom of the screen.

The first set I saw with VIR was a mid to late '70's GE console. I think it used the "YM" chassis. I also saw a Curtis-Mathes with the feature. On both sets, the picture looked better with VIR turned off. It was sometime in the mid '90's when I had these sets. Most of the "auto color" systems I saw were a switch that would disable the front panel adjustments and enable preset controls that were hidden inside the set. In some sets, the user controls would have limited effect with the auto color switch on. Our old '77 RCA ColorTrak 19" had a photocell that would adjust the picture according to room light. I think RCA continued to use the photocell in their better sets up until the early '90's. I've ran into plenty of Thomson era RCA's that have an auto color setting in the user menu. I really couldn't tell any difference in the picture no matter if it was on or off. Like has already been said, most TV broadcast signals are much more stable with less error than they used to be.

We had a GE VIR set in the 80s; I never saw a great difference either way. (I was never crazy about that set; I preferred its tube predecessor) I have also seen ads for "VIR II" but I don't know the scoop on that.

Did you know that the General won an actual Emmy award for VIR?

We had a GE VIR set in the 80s; I never saw a great difference either way. (I was never crazy about that set; I preferred its tube predecessor) I have also seen ads for "VIR II" but I don't know the scoop on that.

Did you know that the General won an actual Emmy award for VIR?

Bryan, I found some information (by doing a Google search) on GE's VIR/VIR II automatic color correction that seems quite interesting; it describes what the VIR (vertical interval reference) signal actually was and its effect on the TV picture (on GE sets equipped with VIR processing circuitry, of course). The VIR signal itself was inserted in the 19th line of each field of video and was quite simple, only containing a chroma reference, luminance (Y) reference, and a reference signal for black level. The TV's VIR decoding circuitry used this signal to correct the differences, if any, between the references in the VIR signal and the tint, color and brightness of the transmitted TV signal. GE hailed this system as one that would truly automate color level tint and black level adjustments (requiring no intervention on the part of the viewer), but it didn't quite live up to its expectations; as a result, the feature was dropped from GE TVs a few years later. I don't know much about VIR II, the second generation of the original VIR system, but I don't think it was that much better than the first. As I said in my first post regarding VIR, most viewers probably did not realize the feature existed on their GE televisions; even if they knew the VIR on/off switch was there, they did not pay much attention to it, leaving it set at the off position. The Chromix control on many high-end Sears Silvertone TVs of the '70s was treated the same way by most set owners; the control injected a soft blue hue into monochrome pictures, but most viewers found the adjustment confusing, too critical in most cases, and not of much value, so they usually just set the control to black and white and forgot about it. The same thing happened with most auto-color correction schemes; the viewers just watched their programs, with little or no regard for the extra buttons, dials, etc. on the front panels of their TVs. I know at least one person who does not bother with the color controls on her TV--she just turns on the set, watches her programs, and turns off the set when the shows are over. That's it. She doesn't know or care about anything else regarding her television set or how it works.

GE's VIR system was a novel experiment, but it just didn't catch on with the viewing public. In fact, I'm downright surprised the system won an Emmy, since it was nowhere near the greatest thing to happen to television since color. For that matter, IMO, neither was RCA's ColorTrak system, which did not rely on signals transmitted in the vertical blanking interval but used a photocell under the CRT to adjust color and black level according to room light conditions. Magnavox, in its high-end color consoles of the '70s, had a similar system it called "Total Automatic Color" which also used a photocell to adjust the same parameters of the picture, again according to room lighting conditions. These systems, however, were not infallible; the ColorTrak system, for example, could well be "fooled" into raising the black level abnormally high (taking the color saturation with it) if, again for example, the set were being viewed in a dark or dimly-lit room. I hate to imagine what some of these ColorTrak sets' pictures may have looked like under such lighting conditions. There are people who enjoy watching television in the dark, much to the horror of eye doctors, who have been warning people for generations against watching TV in a totally-darkened room because of the very real risk of eyestrain. I guess, however, that most people who insisted on watching their TV sets in darkness or dimly-lit rooms would just turn off the ColorTrak or TAC functions of their sets, or, if they left them on, tolerated the horribly overbright, oversaturated color picture that likely resulted when the circuits were bamboozled into lowering the CRT bias to near zero and raising the color level to maximum.

I am glad most or all of those "automatic"/dynamic circuits and buttons are long gone. A display device should be properly adjusted, once, for correct levels, and then left alone until it might need recalibration. The room lighting should be adjusted to allow for good display viewing, not the reverse.

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I remember using a little round plastic degauser that I plugged in to the wall outlet on my folks first color tv (RCA), about 1966. It was always fun to watch the weird color patterns it caused, but I'm not sure it really did anything? :scratch2:

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

I remember using a little round plastic degauser that I plugged in to the wall outlet on my folks first color tv (RCA), about 1966. It was always fun to watch the weird color patterns it caused, but I'm not sure it really did anything? :scratch2:

They are an important tool in the repair of older color tv sets, to remove any magnetism from the crt. By the late 60s all but the cheapest sets had built-in automatic degaussing. A magnetized screen will have blotchy color, so that a picture that is supposed to be all white will have some pink in one corner, some green up top, some blue over on the other side, etc.

I discovered that the crt monitor on my work computer has a manual deguassing feature in the on-screen menu. So when I get really bored I will go on and do it, just to see the special effects!

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.

I was just playing with one of my CTC-53's with Accucolor. The name couldn't be more misleading. There was a golf game on, and with Accucolor turned on, the grass went from green to reddish brown. Intense blues became turquoise.

My best guess is the AccuColor system in your CTC53 must be badly misaligned, as the color distortions you mention with the AccuColor function on seem incredible. However, that's probably why most people didn't use the auto-color correction systems in TVs that had them; they probably figured (and rightly so) that they could get a much better picture, with accurate colors, by adjusting the color controls manually.

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.
I don't know about NTSC tvs out there but now nearly any modern tv here in Europe is multisync/multisystem, I think for you to experience the difference you should use a CRT. LCDs have digital processing and interpolation before getting to the display so I believe you will hardly notice any difference at all (Besides my opinion is that LCDs suck for analog standard definition anyway). Try getting a tv that supports multisync and try getting a PAL source like a dvd player with PAL output, if you can't get a PAL dvd look for a PAL interlaced video on the internet and recompress to MPEG-2 with high settings and burn it on a dvd.

I have both systems here, I was in canada so I have an NTSC VCR hooked up to my tv that supports both systems, in my opinion NTSC VHS videotapes look much better than PAL even when recorded with EP speed compared to PAL's SP, maybe because NTSC has less banwidth the recording is more accurate compared to the original signal. But based on digital satellite reception PAL's live broadcatings look better to me then NTSC, colours are more vivid and resolution is much more detailed, both signals coming from the same receiver and with the same TV.

(Sorry for the long post, and sorry for getting a bit off topic)