Here is one that looks pretty good in the YouTube clips, Esther Williams in Cypress Gardens, from 8-8-60. Some of it is color film, but the parts with Esther, Fernando Lamas and Joey Bishop look to be color videotape. Hugh Downs does a beer commercial that's very good too. To quote a Billy Crystal line when he did Fernando, they "look marvelous." It looks like most of it was shot outside. The second clip is longer and has several musical numbers and the first one starts with the NBC peacock.

Here are some clips...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvq-Y-HQ17o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=913eJIf1nGg

And here is where you can get this color special and many others. The Film Collectors Society of America. It's $14.99 plus shipping.

http://www.thefilmcsa.com/esther-wil...s-gardens.html

Here is their listing of TV specials and many date to the 1960-65 era. It's a treasure trove of stuff and many things I've never heard of before. I have no experience buying any of their offerings so proceed at your own risk. But just looking through their catalog is like stepping back in time for me.

http://www.thefilmcsa.com/tv.html

I agree that the talent shots seem to be live camera to tape, but I wouldn't call any of this even "pretty" good. The video response is awful, blurred and with ringing on the edges (probably from too many generations of different tape formats would be my guess), the hue changes drastically from near normal to yellow/greenish faces later on, and the MPEG coding has significant I-frame pulsing and detail artifact twitching, and appears to be down-rez'd too far, although it's hard to tell since the original video response is so bad. The only positive thing to note is that any noise in the source has been removed in all these generations of processing.

One other oddity that showed up on "legit" DVD a while back: "The Shirley Temple Show", a/k/a "Shirley Temple's Storybook." The transfers were very good, and most were shot on color tape in 1960. The shows themselves...pretty terrible.

GE was still in the broadcast equipment business in the 60's & 70's This included a line of color cameras. Here is a GE color camera photographed in the late 1970's.

Thanks all for the replies. I'm going to see if I can't get in touch with Dan Wingate, the fellow that restored an Eddie Fisher color kine, a Dinah Shore color kine, and the filmed color Burns and Allen program from 1954. I have a project I'm working on that could benefit from nice examples of very early color footage.

That's amazing. very crisp video and the color fidelity is good, and the flesh tones look right on.

Steve Allen Plymouth Show 1959...
 

https://archive.org/details/SteveAllenPlymouthShow

"An episode of "The Steve Allen Plymouth Show". Unfortunately there is a time-code on this copy. Complete with original commercials for Plymouth, but credits are missing. A variety show, with performers including Frankie Laine, Jack Kerouac, Pam Garner, William Bendix, Dayton Allen, and Gabriel Dell."

I don't have to wonder I was a witness to it all.

Came across another, more obscure, Bell Telephone Hour DVD, (doesn't mention Bell Telephone in the title on Amazon). It's a compilation of the Christmas shows they did over the years, including some 1959 footage as well. Great choice as we head closer to the Holidays.

https://www.amazon.com/Old-Fashioned...p;qid=&sr=

Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2qKQev__E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBe0qy5k8vk

This is the 1959 television version of "The Jazz Singer". I'm assuming this would be TK-41 color. A restored version is available on DVD.

Definitely TK-41. You can tell by the facial tones (effects of gamma correction).

I wonder how the image from a 1950's Videotape compares to the image that would have been seen from a live broadcast?

It seems there's no real way to know this since all the existing TK-41 footage is from tape.

My guess is that the tape looks substantially better than what would have been seen by most people.

Say the show originated in Los Angeles, and was being picked up by a viewer watching WWJ-TV in Detroit on a color roundie. The picture would have been sent via microwave links and coaxial cable from LA to Detroit, then the signal would have been re-broadcast locally, picked up at the viewer's antenna, pass through the RF/IF strips and finally been demodulated and displayed on the color kinescope. There is a greater number of variables involved in a live broadcast as opposed to tape, where the signal would have been simply recorded onto quad tape in LA. Pretty easy, and much less room for signal degradation.

I'd be curious to know what video from the ETF's TK-41 will look like. If the feed from the TK-41 at the ETF is recorded onto a medium that allows you to exceed broadcast spec, it would allow us to see what our roundies could have done under the best possible circumstances with video from a TK-41; the circuitry of the set becomes the more limiting factor as opposed to decades old 3M tape. That will be interesting to say the least...

The LA show would have gone to NYC first to insert network commercials (live, tape, kine, slides, balops, announcers) and returned to Detroit and the full network all the way back to LA.