Even though I was born in 1947 I see some of the early product information and a few artifacts that still exist, and I realize early color was amazing!! The results for the most part were outstanding!! The problem was most people weren't even aware of what was taking place right under there feet. The fact that the early color receivers cost as much as most familes annual income had some effect. But as I became aware of color at about the age of seven, I tried to get my dad to take me to tv stores any chance I could to set there with wide eyes and marvel at what I couldnt have.

I had someone tell me at church about an man in the 60's that said "I don't need a color TV 'cause all my favorite shows are in black and white!"

I wonder was it the fact that color sets could be made more cheaply in the late 60's that increased the buying of sets and therefore producers were more eager to make color programs...or was it that more shows were being made in color and thus more people thought they'd get their money's worth out of the color sets?

It seems like the only people who really would buy color sets in the 50's are those that had so much money that they could buy a luxurious product that most of the time would really not do any more than than the common black and white set as there were few color shows.

As I undertsand it, the big move to color came when the sets dropped in price and improved in reliabilty AND when Disney moved to NBC in COLOR ..which was spur to justify spending the money!! And of course and 66-67 everything went into color.

In Australia, when we went into colour in 1975 ...overnight everything was in colour. The 1st of March 1975 is a date burned in my mind in bright red green and blue!!!

as one born in 1945 I remember going downtown Montgomery Alabama in 1955 to the Motorola shops where my dad worked as a set installer and repairman and watching Howdy Doody in color some afternoons on those early Motorola color sets--was thrilling for me and my brother and even at 10 marveled at the color on that show. I'm sure they had their showroom set adjusted about perfect. One of the big problems I understand was people misadjusting the color on a home set. they always had to go out and re-do the set-ups on those sets because people aould constantly screw with the color controls. There were quite a few color sets in Montgomery even then I understand between RCA and Motorola the repairmen kept pretty busy.

Probably the same with HDTV today. I first saw HDTV on a computer monitor and I was amazed at how good 1080i could look. But today, you can use an old clunky computer monitor with an HDTV tuner and get great results, so HDTV today isn't as wonderful as color was back then, but at 1080i, it comes close. :)

Jonathan

I saw part of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in high definition this year. The subtle difference in shades of colors and the detail showed the texture of the floats. It was almost like being there, everything except the cold weather. HDTV is great but standard definition digital is not so great. In fact it's worse than analog. The resolution is actually lower and there are many artifacts in the picture. Maybe one day everything will be in HDTV.

except for the very early videophiles, most people with color sets would turn it on and watch the picture without making any adjustments, intensity too high hue misadjusted, black level wrong, I guess they were just happy to see color, I would guess thats one of the reasons in later manufacturers went to some form of auto-color adjustment, however I always found sets with auto-color were always a trade-off between watching a totally misadjusted picture and watching on set right on the money

HDTV is great but standard definition digital is not so great. In fact it's worse than analog. The resolution is actually lower and there are many artifacts in the picture. Maybe one day everything will be in HDTV.

I disagree I F they are broadcasting it at the full bandwidth needed. When you see one getting all the juice on a hdtv set that line doubles and all the rest of it, it can look stunning. CBS affiliate out here is perfecto.
Problem is the stations are always fixed at 1080i or 720p even though they might be only showing SD material so you can end up with the exact same motion artifacts as if it was HD material. If they just switched to fully loaded SD format instead of a skimped HD format when they do SD it would always be perfect. They are using a bigger pipe than needed for SD and not putting enough bits thru it, rather than using a smaller pipe for perfect SD and giving it 100%. I would think that 480p would be what is needed for perfect SD but I've never seen it broadcast.

Last night here on cable they showed a Nureyev production of the "The Nutcracker"... typical Christmas fare...but the recording was made in 1968 by the BBC.

This would make it a very early BBC colour broadcast.

The colour was astounding even though it was a live broadcast from Covent Garden. The three tube cameras were clearly adjusted carefully and despite the flaring when a dancer moved too fast the images were PAL at its best ...625 lines (ie 580i) and without the red/orange tinge that seems to commonly seems to afflict NTSC from that period. (If you want to compare NTSC and PAL ..or for that matter ATSC and NTSC ...look for any gold objects ..in PAL and ATSC they are gold in NTSC they tend towards an orange color).

It is great to know that the tape has been carefully preserved (there were no obvious tape problems...the picture was stable and without any obvious dropout).

If i'm not mistaken that's only a year after color tv started in England; I think it was 1967 they changed over from that 405 line system they'd used for years. anybody in UK feel free to correct me. (I have been known to be wrong once)

I can't verify the date of color's bow in the UK without a search (though I think you're correct), but I hasten to point out that 405 line b&w wasn't discontinued until many years later. New years day 1985 was when the old standard finally went dark IIRC. Of course anybody who knows better can correct me. Trivia: the 1972 pilot of Are You Being Served only exists today as a transfer from a black & white 405 line tape.

The UK introduced colour for the 1967 Wimbledon as I understand it. Of course there had been test broadcasts in the 50s of 405 line NTSC but for a variety of reasons it was never adopted as standard and the UK waited for the new 625 line service and adopted PAL (over SECAM and NTSC). The early VHS/Beta video recorders in the UK have 405 line and 625 line recording capabilty and many collectors use them to for their 405 line sets. Here is OZ we adopted 625 line from day one (1956) and adopted PAL in 1975.

It should remembered that the UK began broadcasting 405 line in August 1936, years before the US sorted out its NTSC b/w standard. And several years before much of Europe adopted a 443 line standard that the Germans used throughout WWII. Broadcasting in Berlin continued right up until the end of the war ..when the TV transmission tower was destroyed in a bombing raid.

[QUOTE=ceebee23]The UK introduced colour for the 1967 Wimbledon as I understand it. Of course there had been test broadcasts in the 50s of 405 line NTSC but for a variety of reasons it was never adopted as standard and the UK waited for the new 625 line service and adopted PAL (over SECAM and NTSC). The early VHS/Beta video recorders in the UK have 405 line and 625 line recording capabilty and many collectors use them to for their 405 line sets. Here is OZ we adopted 625 line from day one (1956) and adopted PAL in 1975.


This site covers the BBC TV coverage of Queen Elizabeth's coronation in June, 1953. The third paragraph refers to closed circuit experimental color tv coverage with the use of 3 color cameras. THIS IS JUNE 1953!

APTS | 2 June 1953 - Coronation Day
http://www.apts.org.uk/coronation.htm

-Steve D.

This is very interesting ....I wonder what colour system they were using.. I assume a variant of NTSC but was the final NTSC standard in place at this date ..ie June 1953? If not perhaps it was some sort of direct three colour system delivered but cable?

ceebee,

Don't ask me to confirm this, but I vaguely recall that this may have been a varient of he CBS field sequential system. It may have been Steve McVoy that suggested this. I have not found any other documentation on the color telecast.

-Steve D.

This site covers the BBC TV coverage of Queen Elizabeth's coronation in June, 1953. 2 June 1953 - Coronation Dayhttp://www.apts.org.uk/coronation.htm

-Steve D.There’s one thing I think the link left out. There’s a story going around that the 405-line broadcast was being monitored here in the hope that skip would bring live coverage to the U.S., albeit however fleeting. There was a 405 to 525-line converter in the loop on this side of the pond. I don’t recall what network anymore, but it must have been either CBS or NBC. Their live broadcast of the attempt delivered nothing but live snow/noise of the BBC TV channel frequency.

The story is more than just speculation. That June day I glued myself to the family’s 16-inch Silvertone to watch the attempt. All that you could see though was live snow/noise over the Philadelphia channel reporting on the attempt. As far as I could tell, they never picked up so much as a sync pulse that day, and certainly never a hint of BBC video. I don’t remember any state-side chatter that day about a color broadcast.

I've asked some of the folks at the BBC for some info about the color coverage/format... we'll see what the response is. I'm a little curious, myself!

-Kevin

And here's our answer: according to UK TV expert Andy Henderson, the 1953 o/b colour experiment was demonstrated and provided by PYE & the BBC, and limited to a few cameras at key points. It was relayed to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital.

Now there's a closed circuit broadcast I would have liked to see!!

To fuzz the issue a little, however, in searching Google, I note that there are conflicting statements about the format used: Ed Reitan maintains that it was CBS sequential, whereas an ex-BBC employee was told by his boss that he had operated an imported RCA color camera during the coronation ceremonies.

I'm told that someone has a photo that includes one of the color camera positions along the coronation route... they've offered to scan the photo, and I'll let you now what it shows.

-Kevin

Incidentally-- off the topic of the Coronation, but back on the thread topic, here's something else that most of you probably missed the first time around-- it's one of the few known color photos of the original "Price is Right"... just as it would've looked on the old CTCs...

-Kevin

Incidentally-- off the topic of the Coronation, but back on the thread topic, here's something else that most of you probably missed the first time around-- it's one of the few known color photos of the original "Price is Right"... just as it would've looked on the old CTCs...

-Kevin


before we got color my dad took me to a tv store one night and the price is right was on in color! almost had to drag me out of the store

Just a little more on the sub-topic of the 1953 Coronation:

Information from James Russell, of colourisation.com:

"Pye Ltd. demonstrated a 150 frame sequential 405 line closed circuit system at Guy's Hospital in 1950 by sequential additive colour scanning using three-colour rotating discs on both the camera and the receiver. The bandwidth requred was 9 Meg. It was later, in the same year, installed at St. Thomas's Hospital, London.

For the Coronation procession, Pye installed cameras on the roof of a building in Parliament Square and connected by 575 Mc/s radio link to great Ormand street. On the previous day, two directly-viewed receivers were used to give pictures of 16in by 12in and a projection set to give 4 ft by 3 ft. Excellent pictures were seen, the definition and the colour rendering both being good. The colour tubes were of the Lawrence type ( Chromatic Television Inc )."

Additionally, he mentions that a 3D Film documentary was also made of the Coronation.

-Kevin

A dumb question, perhaps, but...Y'all know how impertinent I am : Wonder if anybody thought to actually TRY the trans-Atlantic/color set-up BEFORE it happened, you know, sort of a "dry-run"/rehearsal or something? One of the most important events of '53, everybody knew about it for months in advance, looks like SOMEBODY woulda thunk about this...-Sandy G.

Was the coronation the event that was 'scooped' by lil' old ABC? Seems I read they had a special connection set up with the CBC which had a direct link to the BBC.

The stories at the time indicate that the real race for Coronation footage was between CBS & NBC... what there was of ABC at that time **may** have had some arrangement with CBC, but they would have also had to wait until the first films were flown over from the UK, since there was no possibility of Canada having a live broadcast link back then.

And I think CBS won the race, IIRC...

-Kevin

At my father's mother I got an color tv set in 1984 (color broadcasting for the big audience started in Romania 1983)-the set was my vintage Telecolor 3007 :D. After my parents divorce in 1989, I use untill December the 12, 2000 am B&W set!!! Frankly, untill I got my color set, it dinn't bother me to watch B&W.
@Joel Cairo: nice pic. :thmbsp:

Echoing the others on the pic. I thanked you on the Game Show Forum not knowing you were here too! So no matter where you are, thanks for the history.

colortrakker here, Mystery7 there

Incidentally-- off the topic of the Coronation, but back on the thread topic, here's something else that most of you probably missed the first time around-- it's one of the few known color photos of the original "Price is Right"... just as it would've looked on the old CTCs...

-Kevin
Was the set really all cyan and orange, or is that just the photo? More recent incarnations are much more vaired in color.

The pic is indeed accurate-- I've got the only other known surviving color images (two 35mm slides, taken by a tourist who attended an episode of the show) and the colors are the same.

The original of the pic I posted has (sadly) actually started to fade-- I had to correct a significant green shift before I posted the scan.

-Kevin

For us it was the 1968 Olympic's Dad wanted to see the fights in color the Blood he figured there would be a lot of blood. Well from what I remember Clay kocked everyone out so early there wasn't any blood LOL..

It was a Zenith must have been about 23 inches. Nice set real wood.

Mom worked all summer as a row boss in the strawberry and bean fields around here to pay for it. Made us kids hate picking stuff even more if that was possible. Oh well I made a lot of school cloths money and stuffed a bunch in my little savings account for those years before starting hourly farm work at 12.