Question about the 1956 Emerson C-502 colour TV

[ChrisW6ATV]

They could have really intended to put a rectangular mask on the TV, as in the pictures, even if they knew all along that the CRT would be round. The standard mask shape of all the other round-CRT color sets, commonly called "double-D", was seldom used on black-and-white TVs until about 1949, after which it became universal until rectangular CRTs were available. The double-D shape allows for a larger picture size with the same round CRT than other mask shapes, at the cost of losing picture information in the corners. I have never researched this, but I bet most TV programming in the roundie era was formatted to fit the double-D shape (the on-screen credits, etc.).