early color wanna be's

[oldtvman]

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.

[radiotvnut]

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.

[AU20K]

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.

[mr_fixer]

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

[Cleve]

Originally Posted by AU20K

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.

[stromberg6]

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

[Jeffhs]

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.

[Celt]

Originally Posted by mr_fixer

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.

[oldtvman]

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.

[andy]

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[t0nito]

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

[oldtvman]

Originally Posted by andy

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.

[old_tv_nut]

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!

[Jeffhs]

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?

[Bill R]

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