Fifty Years of Color Television

peter303 writes "The Houston Chronicle notes that color TVs were first manufactured on March 25, 1954 at a price of $1000 (about $4000 in today's dollars). Some of the older folk here remember the excitement of your first neighbors acquiring one of these in the 1960s and as the TV series one-by-one switched to color. Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV."

Comments

Quality was LOUSY until the 1970s...

[dpbsmith]

In theory, the quality should have been OK, and perhaps it was in a studio, on a high-quality monitor, via closed circuit.

In practice, the home receivers of the late 1950s and 1960s were lousy. They were very temperamental beasts. They had no built-in degaussers and if you moved them or turned them you'd get color changes due to the earth's magnetic field.

The tube circuits were unstable and drifted. They had no ability to compensate for any signal variation, so colors shifted from program to commercial, from program to station break, from program to program, and sometimes from camera to camera within a program. You were constantly leaping up to fiddle with the contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue adjustments.

The tubes were never properly converged (and had about seventeen tweaks needed to converge them).

The picture tubes were circular rather than rectangular and cut off significant parts of the picture. The phosphors couldn't deliver much brightness, so they couldn't put the usual neutral tint in the CRT face; a set when turned off looked pale grey rather than dark. When turned on, room light washed out the colors (and if you turned the brightness up the picture looked even worse).

They were trophies and icons of conspicuous consumption, but it wasn't much fun watching them. I've often suspect that at least part of the reason for the popularity of the Disney show is that animated cartoons were relatively unharmed by slight color distortions.

In the 1970s, solid-state circuits and the introduction of various AGC and other automatic-adjustment features finally brought home receivers to the point where they were worth watching.