What color TV was really like back then...

[Charlie]

A few days back, some of you had mentioned dollar DVD's. Last night, I found a bunch of them at Walmart for 88 cents. I grabbed several... some of them being black and white and some in color.

One of the color DVD's was The Lucy Show. Only being 88 cents, it was clear that they didn't remake the color on this particular show. Although I enjoyed the show, the color was absolutely awful! It made me realize that this is probably what watching color TV in the 50's and 60's was really like. The audio was pretty bad as well. My mother had told me in the past that color TV wasn't really that great during the 60's... now I realize what she was talking about.

Another example of this is in my old original Star Trek episodes on VHF that I bought back in the 80's. On the tape, the episode itself is pretty good as far as color is concerned. Following the episode, they show what was coming on next week. That part of it was pretty crappy... you could tell the color wasn't retouched. Looked kinda faded and blurry compared to the episode.

Just goes to show that there must be a lot of work involved in re-coloring these old shows that we see on television today. Makes me wonder if any people were ever disappointed with what color tv was like when they would spend so much money on a set.

If you want to experience what color was probably like back then, buying these dollar DVD's would be the way to experience it!

On a side note, this episode of Lucy involves her winning a bunch of prizes from a local department store. One of the prizes is a new color tv. They wheeled it in and it was a rectangular set. Not sure what brand it was... the layout of the front controls didn't look anything like the typical RCA or Zeniths of the time.

[Steve K]

Hi Charlie:

There are probably a lot of people on this forum that can speak for early color tv better than I but I do remember it back to 1966 when we got our first color set. At the time the color seemed fine but of course we could only compare it to the black and white set that we had before. I do remember that we enjoyed the Kraft food commercials as they showed salads and things that had lots of color. I also remember that during football games and such the grass was nice and green on one shot and when they switched to another camera shot it was blue. We did a lot of adjusting the tint control!

Steve

[Celt]

Well to be fair, the original video may have deteriorated with age. But I remember all too well if the incoming signal wasn't perfect, the color picture looked like hell. Many a time I'd relent and turn the color off. We later installed a 30' tower with a rotor and a pre-amplified Winegard antenna. Made a huge difference in both the TV and FM reception.

[Sandy G]

Seems like a lot of the times the colors really weren't all that hot."Dragnet" for example, almost everything was an ugly shade of blue-green. The live shows were better, looked more lifelike, but the canned shows could be all over the map. Then, too, the early color sets didn't have all the color correction gizmos they have now. Some movies color was just plain awful. Everything was WAY too saturated, looked like the colors were painted on.-Sandy G.

[drh4683]

One thing to note, switching from channel to channel on color programs could be totally different as far as tint goes. Transmitters then didnt have as good of toloerance for keeping the color difference signals in the proper phase like they do now.
An example, the zenith space command 600 has the feature to adjust hue. At that time, the hue control was a very muched used knob on the TV. This justified the development of the space command 600 with its hue control capability. Today, one who sees a SC600 thinks why even have hue adjust on the controller? TV transmitters today have such better circuits for error correction making a hue adjustment a one time adjustment on the TV.
The space command 600 remote lasted from 1965-1972. in 1973 The Space command 600ZX was introduced as the replacement and it did not have the hue adjusting capability. TV transmitters improved to the point (around 1973) that the critical hue adjustment from channel to channel was no longer an issue like it once was.

[Steve D.]

Sorry, but to take an 88 cent dvd copy of a 40 year faded Lucy show and use that as the benchmark for early color is ludicrous. Even in the 50's a well set up color set receiving a live color program or even a film show displayed beautiful pictures. I will admit some of the early video tape color broadcasts were terrible looking, and some adjusting of color and tint controls from station to station was necessary, since many of the automatic color corrections we take for granted today were not available on the early receivers. But watching a filmed Bonanza episode in 1959 or a live Perry Como show in 1956 on your new color set was pretty awesome and very natural in living color.

[Eric H]

I suspect a lot those $1 DVD's are made from worn out 16mm prints that would have been used for syndicated reruns originally

Star Trek, and most other 50's-60's shows, were shot on 35mm originally and the studio DVD sets look terrific in B&W or Color.

I think Color may have actually taken a turn for the worse in the late 60's early 70's when they started taping shows. Those early videos look crappy now, even on DVD.

All In The Family is one example I can think of right off.

[orthophonic]

Those dollar dvds ( I have some) are made from old
transfers to 3/4" tape of worn and faded 16MM syndication prints. They are not what it would
have looked like back then when they would have
broadcast a new 35MM print from an RCA film chain.
The Star Trek is a good example, the old VHS tapes
were mastered from 16MM syndication prints, the
new DVD releases were mastered from the original
35MM interpositives. Most movies are also mastered
from the interpositive. Current network film shows
are mastered from the camera negative transferred and
color corrected to digital tape for editing and then
broadcast.
I am a Telecine Colorist and do this everyday.

[andy]

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[roundscreen]

Charlie If you want to know what color tv was like in the 60s check out tv land on cable. The color on the old tv shows loooks the same as it did back then. I watched alot of them on my grand parents rca when i was a kid. They did have a big antenna on the house with a rotor. That set had a great picture even in b-w.

[Celt]

You know, I definately remember a turn for the worse in audio and video quality of the shows from the early to mid 70's. As mentioned, video tape was probably the culprit. But I also feel that the producers and engineers no longer cared about good audio too.

[old_tv_nut]

Not only is 35mm a good idea, it should be fine-grain 35mm. When we were experimenting with HD captures of 35mm for the FCC ACATS (Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services), we had a short piece of "Murder She Wrote", and the film grain was annoying in HD. These days, CBS is demanding all filmed productions be in high-quality 35mm.

Also, not to be mean, but Angela L. needed more makeup in HD.

And a third thing - we found we couldn't use the clip because it wasn't framed for 16x9 ratio. There was one scene where the bad guy and Angela are talking, and we couldn't understand the gist of the conversation until we looked at the complete 4x3 frame, and the baddie was holding a gun, just below the bottom of the 16x9 cropped picture! The framing would allow showing either the gun or their heads, but not both!

I appear in the opening title sequence of some episodes of Murder She Wrote as a cop struggling with a prisoner as me and another cop escort him up a long series of steps in front of a supposed police station.

Put *that* in your crack pipe and smoke it!

As for sound quality on 70's variety shows....they all seemed to share the exact same sweetening (laughter, audience sounds, etc) and were horrendously overdone. There were always some cat-call whistles thrown in for further annoyance. Who recalls that?

Anthony

[captainmoody]

My Dad purchased our first color set from Hudson's in the early summer of 1969, It was a 19" RCA CTC-27 with matching stand.
I remember the color was just fine on it and not having to mess with the tint at all. I also remember our whole family watching the Apollo takeoff on that set as well as laugh in, the Lucy show and many others with excelent picture quality.

[Aussie Bloke]

Very interesting thread. I'm personally trying to find out what live colour TV shows were like back in the 50s and the closest I've come to seeing is excerpts of the Dinah Shore Chevy Show from late 50s and early 60s and 1960 Howdy Doody Show on DVD.

Anyhow commenting on those so called 88 cent DVDs, yeah they must of been 16mm worn prints of those shows as over here in Australia on Pay TV on the Fox Classics channel we have pretty much all the Lucy Shows from B&W of the 50s to colour in the 60s and 70s and they all are in top notch quality!!! The Lucy Shows of the early 60s look fantastic, rich with colour !!! Anyhow this might not be so related to the 88 cent DVDs but about nearly 5 years back I bought a 60s rock video compilation and the quality of the clips was absolutely shithouse !!! I can understand that kinescope films don't look that good opposed to video but these clips are bloody at least 5th generation copies which makes me wonder how they get away with selling stuff like this? There was also CCR's "Down On The Corner" Ed Sullivan clip which was in colour video but was at least 5th generation as the picture is very blurred, and yet I've taped that 1969 Ed Sullivan Show off Fox Classics in top notch quality!!! From memory I think the company of this video is Scopetone films or something.

Anyhow with films being broadcasted, these days they'll be of pristine quality when broadcasted off Digital Beta opposed to the old days when broadcasted off a telecine because the films have been digitally restored and touched up and put to Digital Beta whereas back in the old days when the film prints were directly played off the telecine the scratches were all there as well as the grain and even the brightness/contrast looked bad in some of them. How I know this is I'm a vintage domestic videotape collector and have watched some films from Philips VCR format videocassettes from 1978/79 and the movies were very grainy, too much intensity or contrast and scratchy, one example being 1954 "War Of The Worlds" which I found on a 1978 recording. Compared to the films, the live television shows of that day were pristine, though with the smaller portable colour broadcast cameras used outdoors the quality varies which some shots the picture is a little blurry and the colour looks a bit out but the 70s were still the early days of colour portable cameras.

With the early years 50s and 60s, restored 35 mm prints of films colour/B&W will look pristine today, don't know how they looked off the telecine way back then but I assume a little more grainier, scratchier and maybe bad too much intensity/contrast but still good but not as good as today with the digital restoration on them.

Videotapes, quality varies on condition of the tape and maybe brand of tape that's used, I have the 1960 final Howdy Doody Show colour special on DVD and the quality looks fantastic in some areas but a bit blurry in others and maybe slightly grainy but looks fantastic for a colour tape that's survived nearly 45 years old !!! Anyhow looking at the few live colour excerpts and shows I have of the early era of colour, the quality of live shows can depend on the techo's camera adjustment, the Dinah Shore Chevy Show the colour looks a bit desaturated and chromium whilst that Howdy Doody Show the colours are really rich and same goes for the Andy Williams Show. A lot of the colour videotaped shows of the 60s I've seen are pretty much in pristine quality, the Ed Sullivan Shows I've taped off Fox Classics the pictures look fantastic on most of them.

Anyhow I use to think that in the 50s and 60s the quality of live television was of the quality of scratchy/grainy B&W kinescope films but learned a few years back that it wasn't the case.

Cheers
Troy