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Old 07-24-2006, 07:52 PM
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The impact of early color

In my lifetime I have witnessed many amazing things but not one of them compare to seeing a color television in the 50's! It was almost sirreal

I can't say that anything has even come close since then
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Old 07-24-2006, 07:56 PM
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and the kicker was for the most part, they got it right. witnesses by the fact that many of the early color sets restored produce a picture that rivals many of today's versions. (analog anyway)
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Old 07-25-2006, 03:32 PM
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Old 07-25-2006, 04:46 PM
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Consumers traded out the early color TVs mainly due to reliability issues. Even the best ones burned through horizontal output tubes, dampers, rectifiers, circuit breakers, convergence board coils, flybacks and vertical components on a regular basis. People watched them several hours every day so things overheated and boards got brittle. Eventually it was fix the TV again or buy a bigger boat. Few could afford both.

Those unreliable components were engineered out one by one. Each generation improved until the current generation of solid state TVs is sufficiently reliable that it required FCC regulations to mandate a trade out. That's what HDTV is all about.
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Old 07-25-2006, 08:35 PM
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I wonder why more was not done to improve the tube type color sets. I know about the problems as we used an RCA CTC-39 for 10 hrs or more a day when I was in high school. Bad solder joints, horizontal output tubes burned out etc. Parents had to buy new TV's when I moved out as the "TV technician" (ME) was not there to take care of the sets anymore. They do take a LOT more maintenance that solid states when they are used a lot. RCA seemed to be the worst with heat destruction of parts. The Zenith hand wired chassis seemed to be the best with regards to heat related problems.
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Old 07-25-2006, 10:02 PM
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Old 07-25-2006, 10:05 PM
Don Lindsly Don Lindsly is offline
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Manufacturing costs drove the migration to solid state. In consumer products, the driver is unit cost. Little else matters. Transistors enable simpler power supplies, no sockets, automatic insertation and low cost. Everything else follows. Cost! Cost! Cost!
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Old 07-26-2006, 03:44 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by oldtvman
In my lifetime I have witnessed many amazing things but not one of them compare to seeing a color television in the 50's! It was almost sirreal
I can't say that anything has even come close since then
Yes, this is absolutely true. I have witnessed the introducing of color television in my childhood. Our family had a b/w tv set, and we only knew television in back and white. When I saw the first color television set--it was in summer of 1969--in the house of an uncle, it was absolutely incredible. Bonanza was on the screen in full color. I only knew this tv show in black and white, and as a child, I thought it was originally in black and white. I could not image that it was in color. Later I saw Gunsmoke and Star Trek in color when school friends invited me to watch color television. But these were very rare moments. In 1977 we got our first color tv set at home. It was a Nordmende tube tv set with shunt regulator.
In total these late 1960s were very exciting times, it was the time of the moon landing, color television, The Beatles and so on. But with respect to media events, I think color television was the greatest revolution since introducing of television, and no other new media can keep up with it.

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Old 07-26-2006, 06:14 AM
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I can't remember the 1st time I saw color TV-I guess it might have been in my grandad's office, he had the Zenith roundie I have now- but I DO remember thinking as a kid that color TV was "the Berries"-as different from regular TV as lightning is from lightning bug. Eckhard, was "Bonanza" popular in Germany ?
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Old 07-26-2006, 09:11 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandy G
Eckhard, was "Bonanza" popular in Germany ?
Yes! Very popular. It was a real "Strassenfeger", as we say in German (= blockbuster? street cleaner). And a bone of contention between kids and parents. The kids want to see Bonanza and the parents said, it is a bad thing for bad kids. Kids start to cry and could see Bonanza, and parents enjoyed too, but not demonstrating that they enjoyed it also.
As far as I remember, in my aerea Bonanza was a political thing too. We lived near the East German border, and we could receive West German television and the sovjet infiltrated East German television. For the East Germans, such capitalistic bullshit was strongly forbidden. But most of the East Germans watched the "black channel" (the name for West German television) and Bonanza too. In an East German television report, scenes of Bonanza were shown together with actual scenes of crime and murder from the West German police departments to demonstrate that people which watch Bonanza become criminals and murders. But this could not the East Germans keep from watching Bonanza.

http://www.mdr.de/damals-in-der-ddr/...d-1601149.html

BTW: color television was introduced in 1969 in East Germany. I have seen there the "Raduga" (= rainbow) color tv receiver, a sovjet brand with a shunt reguator. High voltage regulation was incorrectly, and reached more than 45,000 volts in case of failures. So many of these sets burned. Therefore they were usually called the "fire bombs".

Today I know that the first Raduga was a roundie too:

http://www.telesputnik.ru/archive/all/n09/54.html

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Old 07-26-2006, 09:23 AM
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Old 07-26-2006, 09:29 AM
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That Soviet article is very interesting. Kinda ironic, too, because several of the "big Daddys" of TV's early development were ex-pat Russians- Vladimir Zworkin at RCA, David Sarnoff-who WAS RCA-Alexander Poniatoff-the guy behind Ampex, & William Paley, the big dog at CBS.
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Old 07-26-2006, 11:00 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by andy
I'm too young to have ever not known color TV.
I have made a demonstration of tube b/w tv sets for teenage children. At first they became nervous because they had to wait more than a minute before the picture appeared on the screen. They said if they had to wait such a long time after switching on to see a picture they would probably loose the delight (lust?) of watching television.
Second they realized that the picture was in black and white. They watched their wellknow tv programme in black and white, and they could not understand why it is in black and white and not in color.
One of them found an explanation: "it must be an East German tv set". It was not an East German tv set, but his explanation depends on the fact, that East German programmes appeared in black and white on West German tv sets due to the different television norm.
In total they can't understand how it was to watch tv only in black and white and why it was possible that color broadcasts appear in black and white on a b/w tv set. I tried to explain it with the fact of compatibility, but they don't really understand.
I believe they keep me for an alien.

Eckhard
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Old 07-26-2006, 12:13 PM
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My parents bought a tube color set before I was born. I was just thinking, I don't recall ever seeing a great color picture on a GE tube set-but then, that old KE chassis I grew up with must have done okay. I guess I didn't have anything to compare it to. In the 70s I had one aunt with a similiar GE, an uncle with a late 60s Admiral-nobody I knew had a Zenith. Some friends of my parents had and early solid state RCA. To this kid, they all looked fine!

I can attest to the reliability issue. It seemed that the repairman was over to our house monthly. I recall once there was a giftwrapped package in the closet and I eagerly asked who it was for. My Mom told me "Bruce". Well, there was a (then) young guy working for my father by that name, but I thought it was for Bruce Meredith, the TV repairman. That I knew him by name, and was not surprised that he would be getting a gift from my parents, well, that speaks for how often he visited! When that set was retired for a solid state GE (post-modular chassis era) the visits stopped. I think they came by once when the set was very new and that was for something minor. In 1990 my grandfather bought a new 19" Sylvania (NAP/US built) and my father bought a new 19" GE (RCA, also US built). Both sets needed repair in their first year but have done fine since and are still going strong to this day.
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Old 07-26-2006, 01:07 PM
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If I can veer away from the issue of reliability and comment on the "impact," although I didn't arrive until a decade after color TV did, I remember asking as a kid about those early days of color and the very negative comments made about "green skin" and ISTR that either "terrible" or even "horrible" was the adjective which summed up an impression which was then about twenty years past.

This conversation was at a time when an aquaintance of my grandparents' still refused to buy a color TV, such was the impression left by early demonstrations.

On the other hand, I recall reading an article by critic John Crosby (not an easy man to please) which was published in one of the major magazines in January, 1955 in which he stated almost incidentally to the rest of the piece: "color television is already here and it is technically magnificent." There's no telling which set he was watching, though I guess going purely by the odds it was probably a CT-100. And he would be one who could afford--and would demand--meticulous setup of his receiver in every way with many, many more times the attention to every detail from antenna lead-in to convergence than would be given to the average set on the showroom floor.

So while beautiful living color was of course promised, and under the best circumstances was probably enjoyed, color TV's very slow acceptance can probably be attributed to its lack of impact upon many due to underwhelming results seen in many early demonstrations.
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