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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."
1669 hours... a perspective:
If you are awake 16 hours per day 1669 hours is 104 days, not "just" 70. Apparently, on average, adults watch TV 29% of their waking hours. If you work/commute 45 hours per week, your "free time" is, if you do nothing else, about 9 1/2 hours per day, of which, on average, you watch TV 4 1/2 hours.
So the average adult uses more than half of their available time watching TV.
Pretty sad.
Amy
Actually, there have been numerous quality improvements, though they have come in the receivers, rather than in the NTSC standard. The standard itself is rather elegant, and apart from the error that resulted in shifting to a non-integer frame rate (and the problems that has created for designers of hardware for decades), it has proved very robust.
--- Bill
My dad recalls (born in 1952) when his neighbors got color TV and he remembers everyone on the street tried to get in the house to watch it.
He remembers one time when it broke and the whole neighborhood pitched in to fix it...
Last time I was in Britain, I made some comment to a cousin of mine about their wide-format TV and all the shows that are shown in that format. She responded "Yeah, we just go that last year, we're so far behind North America". Boy was she surprised to hear that we're still years away from that change over here!
And of course the fact that PAL is higher resolution that NTSC, and we realize how little has changed in this past 50 years. Why exactly has it taken North America so long to change to a better format? I'd imagine the HDTV change will happen almost overnight, much like the DVD revolution, but it sure took a while for the quality of TV to step up a notch.
Now if they could only do something about what's actually ON the tube.... or, um.. the flat panel?
actually, the quality hasn't changed, back even further than that. since color tv was to be able to be forwards and backwards compatible with black and white, the color signal was hacked into the black and white standard.
this was not the case in britain, where a new, but incompatible, standard was created, that used bandwidth more effectively, and had better color.
so hdtv is the first new standard since about 1939. it's about damn time.
this proves, once again, that standards are a double-edged sword. use and choose carefully...
stored on computers from birth to the grave
To say that there have been no major quality improvements in color television isn't entirely correct. The televisions themselves have implemented better and better filtering algorithms and can better lock onto signals than they used to. Color realism has gotten better with newer TV's to project more fleshy tones and more accurate color temperatures.
Then there have been improvements in the means of broadcasting signals. Cable TV was introduced, and not too long after was followed by satellite reception (with their appropriate receivers), both of which improved the strength of the signal and integrity of the image. In more recent years, digital cable and satellite hit it big, and allow for near-perfect signal quality and picture integrity.
The only thing that hasn't really changed up to this point has been the resolution, and this has partly been a result of how well the TV market took off after its introduction. It's hard to change a standard once it has been in place and is used by everyone. Optimally, it would be nice if there was a way to allow HDTV signals to continue to be received by regular definition TVs so that broadcasters wouldn't have to maintain separate equipment, but the technology is so much different that it would be impractical. This is why the introduction of HDTV has taken so long.
KappaStone
According to The Inflation Calculator What cost $1000 in 1954 would cost $6468.58 in 2002 and I know teh US hasn't been dropping prices of late.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
BTW, they even did 3D TV around the same period.
Needless to say few people ever purchased Baird televisors, the picture quality was even worse than NTSC.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Nothing highlights the amazing cost that has been aquiring HDTV like this.
$1000 then / $4000 now for the first round of color TVs?
It was something like $10000-20000 for the first round of HDTVs. In the last year they were just now coming down to the $4000 range, especially if you count the cost of the HDTV tuner as part of the TV cost.
Today you can get them for sub-$1000 but not with a tuner so far, which puts it at a minimum of $1200 for full HDTV.
How long did it take before the broadcast networks considered color to be "it"? I know in the early 80's I was still watching on a B&W tv about 1/2 the time. -Good- color quality didn't really happen until the late 80's.
That is 30 years for a full transition.
Makes the time it has taken to get HDTV adopted (2 years before it is considered defacto, probably 10 more before you get rid of the majority of old color boxes that are using downscan converters) to be alot less painful than people usually make it sound.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Anyway, like all new technology, first they trumpt the technology itself. I remember NBC shows beginning with the colorful peacock logo and the voiceover saying, "The following program is brought to you in living color," a sentiment that today makes you think, "Duh!" but back then meant something new about the tech. That's the typical arc for technology. First they talk about the tech, and then the tech just melts into the background and nobody thinks about how it happens, they just enjoy that it happens.
so,if we never got colour television would that have prevented the late 90's slew of home design/decoration/demolition programs, the inventors have a lot to answer for! ;)
Software Freedom Day!.
There are infinitely-many sets of primary colours you could use to represent RGB colour. In an RGB colour space any set of three linearly-independent vectors will do for the primary colours. The YUV model was designed for compatibility (Y = black and white) and realism, since the U and V primaries are closely related to important colours like human skin tones. Can't have people looking like Vulcans, now can we? :-)
We never had a colour TV when I was growing up. Always black and white. When we moved out to the country colour was irrelevant anyway (snowy pictures look much worse in colour), until we got a satellite system.
Historical tidbit: the Apollo video from the Moon used a frame-sequential colour system, which was converted once it got back to Earth.
Technical tidbit: some ham radio folks use a system called Slow Scan TV ( SSTV), which transmits still images over the radio. They usually use a line-sequential colour system, which gives the signals a distinctive waltz-like sound. Your best bet for such signals is around 14230 kHz. People used to use all kinds of weird and wonderful dedicated hardware, but now a computer with a sound card is the usual setup.
...laura
There is nothing on TV that makes you not think.
The Simpsons brought up all kinds of ideas, thoughts, ans stuff to think about. Many people may have chose not to take the opportunity to discuss some issues, but thats not TV's fault.
I challenge you to pick a TV show that there is no opportunity to think.
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