January 27, 1953: First Public Broadcast Demonstration of RCA-NTSC Color Television

[dtvmcdonald]

The most amazing thing about the CT-100 is the optimum viewing distance. I'm
78 years old and have perfect vision except that I can't focus at all. I'm focused precisely at infinity for yellow light. So I own piles and piles of cheap "reading glasses"
all the way from 0.5 to 3.2 diopters. You can't seem to buy 0.5 ones so I made my own from surplus lenses glued in frames. Using 0.5 diopter ones I pretty much good out to 15 feet. I always used optimal ones.

So on several occasions I've watched TV on my set trying different distances
with glasses optimal for that distance. I've used my own test patterns, "Digital Video Essentials" and two versions of the Wizard of Oz on DVD and Blu-Ray, and OTA TV from a convertor box, over a B-T agile modulator on channels 3, 11, and 39. The OTA
TV was mostly baseball and football. I've shown most of my own pattern's results in this forum.

The result is that three to four feet is optimal. At those distances I can still see a bit of the color dots. At six feet they are pretty much gone. Yet I prefer closer, as there
is still more real detail to see.

I simply do not notice the Q channel poor response except in one particular case: Minnesota Vikings games on nice bright green grass fields. The Jets, Ravens, and Eagles for some reason don't seem to be a problem, probably because they are darker even though they are also essentially pure + or - Q. The Vikings are distressingly blurred. Interesting tidbit: you can find RGB values for all NFL team colors via a simple Google search. For that much money changing hands, apparently such things matter a lot!