HDTV vs color television
 

after living throught the birth of both technologies, I find litte comparison in the two. HDTV was a natural progression from analog. Color television had no predicessor. The hard work, the network battles between NBC an CBS would make for a hit mini-series. but after all is said and done, I don't find the same passion or feeling watching my HDTV as I do any one of my 6 roundies.

as an after thought, one of the reasons RCA had such a hard time selling color was the way it left many of the contributors to color in the dust and took basically full credit for the NTSC system, although I you look back in history, there were other companies that made major contributions to the NTSC system. and then there was the battle between GEN Sarnoff and William Palley of CBS.

For me, ATSC HD today is every bit as much of a jaw dropper as the first time I saw color TV in 1957.

I believe HDTV parallels the early days of NTSC color in this way— the technology behind the picture is amazing and awe inspiring. The same six megahertz of NTSC bandwidth that found space for chroma information in 1953 now contains an ATSC 1080i, 16x9 video with five discrete full-bandwidth audio channels plus a subwoofer channel. In the first NTSC color sets, the bandwidth of their video amplifiers was about 3-MHz, and the picture looks good. In an ATSC HD set, the video-amplifier bandwidth is about ten times as much as a CT-100.

There are a lot of variables, and television manufacturer’s shuffle designs to fit marketing strategy. But when you view high-definition video generated with the best HD cameras on a CRT with a dot pitch fine enough to reproduce what the system can deliver, for me it’s worth looking at even though the content doesn’t always measure up to the technology.

As for the behind-the-scenes developers of analog color television: These are some of the companies who contributed to the 1953 NTSC color television standard.

• American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation
• Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation
• General Electric Company
• Hazeltine Research, Inc.
• N. V. Phillips’ Gloeilanpamfabricken
• Philco Corporation
• Westinghouse Electric Corporation

It’s a list that was compiled by RCA and appears on a label inside the cabinet of every CT-100 made.

Here’s a link to a page on my CT-100 site discussing the Hazeltine and Philco contributions to NTSC color television.

http://home.att.net/~pldexnis/potpou...12-5-1950.html

Pete

The big difference Pete is that HDTV was much easier for the designers to bring to the marketplace, than back in the late 40's and early 50's when all inventions had to be designed from the ground up, sometimes with no path to follow, the biggest decision that they had with HDTV was which system to go with I saw a report that still considers the tri-color crt to be considered one of the modern marvels of the 20th century

BobGary, I'll second that! I've got a 25" BPC TV in my listening room with a VCR and every single year there are fewer and fewer shows to tape and watch. Literally, days can go by and I'll not even turn on the set. Other family members watch TV far, far more than I do. HDTV was nothing more than the NAB's attempt to hang on to spectrum space. Ironic, since (in my area at least) 90% of all sets in my area are hooked up to cable. There's so little worth watching now, that when the analog stations go off the air I just might not even bother replacing the set or getting a pricey set-top converter.

Tom

The ONLY reason I have cable TV is because I cannot have cable internet without it. There isn't any option other than SBC DSL service, which is slower and higher in price. If it wasn't for National Geographic, The Weather Channel some PBS programming, I'd probably never turn the damn thing on. Every once in a great while I'll watch a DVD, but even that doesn't happen much. Like radio, TV has seen better days.

I agree with Pete pretty much on this. But to appreciate the value of HDTV, the display needs to be much larger than a 21" roundie. I have a projector in my basement that displays about 11' x 7' high on the wall. And at that size there is a glaring difference between analog and true HD (1920 x 1080i). Just to give you an idea there is 5 times the amount of resolution for HD as there is coming from a standard progressive scan dvd (720 x 480p). And a dvd is much better resolution than an old style standard analog broadcast at 240i. It is much more than resolution alone, the color pallet is way higher as well and it is obvious. Some HD scenes look so real it is as though you are fooled into thinking you are looking out a window instead of a mere projection on the wall.

The remarkable difference is definately there but you will not see or notice the quality difference at the smaller screen sizes IMO. But screen sizes on sets are now getting progressively bigger as well.

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I still think HDTV is a reasonably good idea, I suppose, but an answer to a question nobody asked. I've seen demos of HDTV, yeah, its got a GREAT picture, whoopty doo, yadda, yadda, yadda. Pisses me off come Jan 2007 or 2008, 2009, 2010, take yer pick, all my old tvs are gonna be obsolete & won't work. John Q. Public is prolly gonna be pretty steamed, too that he won't be able to watch his beloved new year's day football games. If HDTV was as golly-gee-whiz as color TV was then, they'd have made it backwards compatible...But WTF do I know...-Sandy G.

I have no desire to see HDTV. If the programming was worth something, I may rethink that. As long as the nets are shoveling shit, my sets will be showing DVD's of Archie Bunker, Hogan's Heroes, etc. I could care less about all this reality stuff. Is ther a sitcom that is actually funny anymore? When i turn on the news, i don't care about what that dumb prettyboy Brad Pitt is doing (if it were up to me, that dumbass would get drafted and traded for hostages in Iraq). Other than some PBS offerings, I watch little TV.

I will never have the passion of seeing HDTV, like the passion I have of firing up a restored roundie and watching Archie blowing a raspberry at Meathead.

Seems like the opposite to me - color tv was really just 'colored television' and used the same basic system, resolution, transmission etc. HDTV is totally new and non-compatible. Analog to digital may be a natural progression but it is more uphill to get people to switch to it as to color.
I remember getting my bigscreen HDTV about a year and a half ago and I don't know how fantastic color looked at first but I was truly astounded by how good it looked when showing broadcast HDTV. And after watching something in HDTV for a little while, if you immediately look at analog again it almost gives you a headache the quality difference is so stark. That didn't happen between BW and color (still doesn't!)...Frenchy

Yeah, Everybody Loves Raymond, but now it's in reruns only so forget in HDTV after CBS finishes up the rest (it looks pretty close to it when broadcast by KTLA out here in Los Angeles.) This is the only sitcom that I have actually watched regularly in 10 years and thought was genuinely funny where I love to watch it over and over.

When people complain about TV being lousy nowadays it is necessary to point out that TV has ALWAYS been like this, a few good shows on in the schedule and the rest sub-par or junk. All the dumptruck loads of crap shows that used to be on disappear and nobody even remembers they existed. Crap shows on now are ON now so we see them and think, gee tv stinks now but used to be all great. Sorry, but that's rose-colored bunk.

<<<I still think HDTV is a reasonably good idea, I suppose, but an answer to a question nobody asked. I've seen demos of HDTV, yeah, its got a GREAT picture, whoopty doo, yadda, yadda, yadda. >>>

If that's the case do we really need widescreen 70mm movies? Isn't what they were using in 1940 good enough? Look, people have been wanting bigger TV screens since tv came out. There comes a point where after you blow up analog shows up start to look like crap. So the only answer to that problem is HDTV. Now they can watch giant screens and still have the picture look sharp similar to a movie screen.

<<Pisses me off come Jan 2007 or 2008, 2009, 2010, take yer pick, all my old tvs are gonna be obsolete & won't work. John Q. Public is prolly gonna be pretty steamed, too that he won't be able to watch his beloved new year's day football games.>>>

We will be able to buy cheap little boxes that downconvert it to analog and watch our old tv sets forever, so don't start taking them down to the Salvation Army yet ; )

<<If HDTV was as golly-gee-whiz as color TV was then, they'd have made it backwards compatible...But WTF do I know...-Sandy G.[/QUOTE]>>>

There comes a point where something new is so much newer (50+ years newer) and better (10x the resolution) than the old you can't do the compatibility thing. Color was just black and white with color squeezed into the signal and the big technology hurdle was making the color picture tube. Plus it was only separated from the beginning of BW by about 15 years.

One wonders how much of this is the programming and how much of it is us? I hardly watch anything on TV nowadays either but used to watch a ton. They put shows on that young people watch. I ain't young anymore (45 ain't old but it ain't young either!) : 0 I venture to guess it has been like that for a LONG time, perhaps since TV began. I was reading a book about Jackie Gleason and it said that part of CBS's reasoning for finally dumping him in 1970 was they wanted the younger viewers that he was not bringing in. This is not a new phenomenon.

Remember when CBS dumped all of the country and rural shows in one fell swoop in 1971? We lost most of my favorite shows then. I've got several modluators for my NTSC sets ready to go when they all fall silent. I'm not looking forward to that day.