So one of my friends is in the TV calibration department. His job is to make sure colors are as accurate as possible.

Even though he normally deals with modern home theater stuff, he is willing to take a look at my Samsung, use a machine that will attach itself to the face of the CRT, and allow us to see just how accurate this Samsung is.

I will literally, be able to see in a plot, like this, the accuracy of the colors of this nice old TV.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png/240px-CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png

Taking a picture is fine and all, but a gamut chart like that, will be far more better to show you guys just how good this sucker is.

(Lets hope I'm not disappointed, lol).

So, had the TV calibrated professionally to 65k as close as the TV will allow, and we got it pretty good. The low end on this TV is just wonky and no amount of trying could ever get it quite right, but that's ok.. The overall picture including flesh tones, looks great.. I did this because I wasn't believing in the service switch on the TV, it looked awesome at first, but something was off, flesh tones.

Oddly when the gamut was measured, we learned something about both the phosphors and the NTSC decoder.. The green phosphors aren't good on this CRT, and the NTSC decoder just can't get magenta and cyan right. (Cyan is probably due to the odd green phosphors). Blue and red however, are freakin perfect.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Evilweredragon/ScreenShot2012-09-08at70222PM.png

You've probably got this thing set up better than the factory did.

Oh yea, far better, lol.

Kinda weird about it's cyan and magenta issue, and green..

Non-spec phosphors were used in most all NTSC sets after the 21AXP22 CRTs went out of vogue so getting perfect NTSC colors on a newer set should not be possible.....That said it looks like you have got that set as close to perfect as it's design allows. Nice work!

So, had the TV calibrated professionally to 65k as close as the TV will allow, and we got it pretty good. The low end on this TV is just wonky and no amount of trying could ever get it quite right, but that's ok.. The overall picture including flesh tones, looks great.. I did this because I wasn't believing in the service switch on the TV, it looked awesome at first, but something was off, flesh tones.

Oddly when the gamut was measured, we learned something about both the phosphors and the NTSC decoder.. The green phosphors aren't good on this CRT, and the NTSC decoder just can't get magenta and cyan right. (Cyan is probably due to the odd green phosphors). Blue and red however, are freakin perfect.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Evilweredragon/ScreenShot2012-09-08at70222PM.png

On these charts, which are the aim points and which are your set? (squares vs round dots)

Square is where it should be for the perfect color, round is where it really is.

On this TV only the primary colors can be calibrated. Secondary colors cannot be calibrated because it's all set by the video decoder chip inside. Best you can do this mess with the white balance and the tint controls.

So for colors the best we can do is get red and blue nearly perfect, the color green won't get perfect and it might just be the phosphors on the CRT.

OK, let me 'splain a few things.

Those aim points are not NTSC primaries, they are Rec 709 (HDTV) primaries. Since they are based on modern phosphors, most sets will be close, as yours is.
Some sulfide green phosphors (which is what this is) were more yellowish than others, expecially some that included cadmium. Yours is slightly yellower than Rec 709.

NTSC practice in cameras and receivers was essentially out of control from the time the sulfide green was adopted. Receiver manufacturers adjusted decoders to get a reasonable hue variation between red and green. Camera manufacturers also made arbitrary adjustments to get good pictures on studio monitors using the sulfide green.
This mess was never really fixed.
There are a couple of other things going on. The fix for the green phosphor in the receiver is to increase R-Y gain. This fixes the hue variation from red through yellow to green, but because the CRT is non-linear, it also over-drives bright reds, which you can see in your bar chart. Another thing is that designers, to various degrees at varioius times, deliberately made the decoder to make magenta less purple. This was to reduce variation in flesh tones, and you can get away with it because there are no natural colors in this region that viewers know is just so. Your set shows this typical sort of shift in magenta.

PAL standards were established after sulfide green was adopted, so they have had correct color all along. With HDTV, a minor variation on the sulfide green was adopted as the standard, so HDTV generally gets color correct, very similarly to PAL.

The HDTV rec. 709 primaries are also used in still photography and called sRGB. Their huge advantage is that everyone has standardized on them and if no different information is provided, you can assume that they are the intent of the source.

The major disadvantage of the yellowish green is that the gamut (triangle) excludes some cyan colors that occur fairly frequently in some bright women's clothing, and in some artwork and product packaging (and less often in nature).

The rec 709 red, which is essentially the same as NTSC red, is slightly orangy. It can reproduce car taillights, but not traffic signal red or LED red.

The blue is actually more violet than NTSC blue.

Ahh ok, thanks for this information.

Compared to my PVM, they do look very close now.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Evilweredragon/_IGP7058.jpg

Slightly different but that's ok!

Old TV Nut, Thanks for adding your input. There was a great discussion on this topic at the ETF this year.

Yea, I'm glad to learn of these things because I thought the phosphors were the same at least.

And now, my old TV is hooked up with Bluray!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Evilweredragon/_IGP7061.jpg

Oddly enough, my Sony VCR is handling the Macrovision quite well, and stripping it when used as an RF modulator for the bluray player, because no Macrovision is happening here.. Now if I put a tape in the VCR and hit record, THEN macrovision kicks in.. So strange, but hell that works for me!