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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."
Yea, but when will slashdot get some new colours too?
...and there's STILL nothing on!
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
Cheeky buggers.
I remember when business desktop computers first went to color. First the IBM PC and then the Mac (technically I suppose the Apple ][ was a business machine). "Ah," I thought to myself, "this will never catch on..."
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.
Was HDTV really even necessary? Our tax dollars were spent mandating its deployment, our money will be wasted purchasing the receivers (which are going to have to be in all TVs), and what does it do for us? Nothing.
We worry about the effects of lack of exercise, overeating, diabetes, etc, yet we mandate better TV signals and are double paying for it.
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...
They did it right back then. Good technology (lasted 50 years), allowed the market, not the government, to push adaptation. Somehow I doubt we will still be using HDTV (at least what the current incarnation is) in 50 years.
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?
Forget HDTV, where is our Smell-o-vision?
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
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
I don't know about the TV image qualities where you are, but Cable TV certainly improved image qualities. Ok, ok, this is not an improvement on image quality, but on transmission, but to the people sitting at home, it didn't make a difference. Why do I bring it up? Because Cable TV allowed for additional channels and offered image quality good enough that people are willing to pay to subscribe to it. And quite frankly, no matter how good the pictures, if you don't have good transmission/reception, it's still pretty crappy.
I never complained about the quality. I'm pretty sure few people have. I tried digital cable for three months and thought is sucked. Interrupted movies. Pixelated scenes. Heck, did that with an antenna withought coughing up $80/month.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Black and white wasn't enough for me, I guess...
My mom recalls me, as a toddler, telling my dad to "make Big Bird yellow".
In more recent years, Tivo is my second most favorite enhancemenet to television.
I find no confort in being able to watch "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" in HDTV...
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
Are you referring to my Gamecube monitor?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I think TV has more to do with what is ON it, not what is IN the TV electronics.
Programming quality has greatly improved since even the 1980s, and so has the picture/colour too, in my opinion. The cameras are sharper, and don't produce as many streaks when they move in dim areas.
The quality of the TV electronics has declined if anything. Now that they are made in Mexico, instead of places where quality was a desirable feature, I hear lots of people complaining they die within a year. Plasma TVs for instace only have a lifespan at maximum of about 7 years, compared to I suppose ~15 for CRTs. I have two working 20" colour TVs that are both at least 15 years old.
I would rather watch a fuzzy show I like, than a sharp/crystal clear show of some tiresome comedy like Everybody Hate Raymond.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
But what about digital TV broadcasts, we've had these for a few years, and they've certainly made a big difference to the old analogue signal. Plus there's also audio improvements including Mono -> Nicam Stereo, and Doly Digital 5.1 broadcasts through digital satellite transmissions (using Sky+ for example). AND we also have receiver improvements, including CVBS -> S/Video -> RGB -> Component, and 100Hz TVs, widescreen TVs...
Yes I can remember seeing color TV in the late '60s, but it wasn't until the mid '70s when my family finally replaced our old black & white TV. A lot of people held off saying they'd wait "until color is perfected." In my memory, color didn't look reliably good until the '80s.
-- Boycott Shell
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
I suspect the number of charged particles shot at viewers has been reduced.
You used to be able to put a magnet up to a B&W TV and distort the picture temporarily. That was fun. Then along come these color TVs that when you put a magnet to them it premanently makes sections of it all red, blue, or green. Bah! That's not fun.
The current standard has been around for 50 years because it's "Good enough". Nobody saw (and still, few people see) a reason for switching to higher resolution television. I suppose it would be nice for your hardware to show movies in hi-res, but who can honestly say they can't wait to see The Simpsons broadcast in hi-res?
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
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.
Assuming HDTV actually switches over in 2006...
I would argue that there were two major quality improvements in TV with the advents of video tape and digital compression. The first was a revolution of time, since people could now watch what they wanted when they wanted regardless of when the stations/theaters were showing it. The second enabled a revolution in distribution, as it allows cleaner transmission in smaller channels and arbitrary additional content. This is mainly manifested in DVD but is equally applicable to digital cable, video on demand, and online distribution (legal or otherwise, with anime fansubs and other non-domestic shows being the most striking application). Thanks to digital tech you can bundle on a ton of extras, edit with ease, and lower the cost of distribution and replication to inconsequential levels.
HDTV is a nice improvement in video quality to theater-grade levels. But the video and digital revolutions are far more significant, and will continue to trump HD where both can not be accomodated. After all, what matters the most is not the presentation but content.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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.
Can you provide a link to this "non-integer frame rate" please?
e ld_NTSC _sequence/index.html
Look here:
http://www.poynton.com/notes/video/Four-fi
--- Bill
As someone who is extremely interested in DV production, HDTV and more specifically HD DV are going to be a boon to the industry.
Consumer and pro-sumer cameras are going to get a whole lot better in terms of color sampling and resolution. The ability for the start-up movie maker or videographer to turn in a superior product will prove to be much better with this technology, also.
I don't know how much different the standard is for HDTV between different countries, but I'm sure if pros and the like don't have to choose between NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, there will also be quite a few happy people out there.
Area Man
-- taking over the world, we are.
Here are some links to the history of television.
Meanwhile, another friend of mine's dad was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley to develop the Trinitron tube. Sony ended up with the manufacturing rights because not one of the 5 U.S. television companies was interested and the Europeans couldn't manage the manufacturing difficulties.
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.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You know, the broadcast flag feature. That alone will kill Digital TV.
What's next?:
-No channel skipping during commercials?
-No mute during commercials?
-Involuntary channel changes?
-Can't turn off the TV during commercials?
-Mandatory commercials during power on?
At that rate they should just make the precious controled-content pay-per-view then but don't touch my remote after that!
They want complete control but don't want to pay for the TV. Who's TV is it anyway? I paid for the dawn thing! Keep your MPAA/RIAA/xxAA hand off my Frelling remote!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"Why is it that every time we have an article even remotely related to TV, we get the same people complaining that Americans watch too much TV"
For the same reason any group of people makes a fuss about their existence: to demonstrate a viable alternative. It's unusually common to believe that everyone else thinks the same way you do. That's why people stick to small talk- to avoid the complications and emotions that come out of discovering this other person you want to like (or at least tolerate) is the opposite to you in all the areas you truly value.
For the sake of completeness, I'll say: TV sucks, SUVs suck, malls suck, SSRIs suck, laziness and obesity sucks. I've tried them all and abandoned them all. So there.
This is the marketplace of ideas, isn't it?
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
In '65... and all the cool TV shows of the era... "Combat", "12 O'Clock High" were still in black and white!!
But what really kills me... I remember my mother letting me stay home from school to watch all the Gemini launches in *color*... and now I see shows on the History Channel about Gemini and the film is black and white!! I REMEMBER color! Where's the color!!
Maybe six hours a night, we'd drag string around the living room, goof around with the fether duster, throw things back and forth, etc. The beast, very aloof even for a feline, got more attention in two weeks than she probably had in the previous six months.
Man, was she pissed when we got that TV back.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Color TV is quite a cool hack, when you think about it. The color encoding that they used, YIQ, allowed for backward compatibility with black and white television.
Never mind, I found an article detailing the story of the inventor:
/ co ntent.html
http://www.lomcximo.com/english/people/camarena
WITHOUT MONEY
He claimed not to have a penny from his inventions, as he had invested all of his money in new research.
Can the inventor of the first color television be Latin American?
In 1940 at the age of 22, Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena obtained US Patent
No. 2,296,022, which protected his "Trichromatic" system used for color television transmissions.
Gonzalez Camarena was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1917.
In 1932, after two years of studies, he left the mechanical-electrical engineering program at the National Polytechnic Institute to work as an operator at the radio station of his country?s Department of Public Education.
HIS OTHER SELF
Besides being an inventor, Gonzalez Camarena liked astronomy, he was a connoisseur of archeology and mexican history, played several musical instruments and composed beautiful songs.
In 1934 he built his first monochromatic television camera from scrap materials he got from flea markets.
After his US patent for the color television on August 19, 1940, he registered his invention at the Mexican Office of Patents and Trademarks, No. 10,235, thus protecting himself against plagiarism and prohibited use of his invention in his country.
He immediately went to work, as chief operator, to the radio stations XEW and XEQ in the Mexican capital.
In 1942 he began experimenting with television transmissions from his home, and in 1946 he founded XEGC, the first experimental television station in Mexico, with only two receptors built and installed by himself; one in XEW and the other in the Mexican League of Radio Experimenters.
My ideal is to build economical receptors so that everyone can have one.
In 1948 he established Gon-Com Laboratories to manufacture TV transmission equipment, which he succeeded in exporting to the US two years later.
That same year he invented the first remote control in Mexico, showcased at the Presidential Objective Exposition that took place in the center of the city.
Of specific importance is the first black and white transmission of a surgical procedure by closed circuit television during the 7th Assembly of Surgeons, an experience that was repeated the following year during the same Assembly, but this time in full color.
In 1950, he obtained the right to commercialize Channel 5 in Mexico with the acronym XHGC, where two years later he began operations on May 10th with a Mother?s Day festival; but it wasn?t until August 18th that he began regular broadcasts.
In 1960, Gonzalez Camarena obtained in Mexico and in the US patents for his ?Kaleidoscope?, an innovative color television system that was later improved and protected under a new patent in 1962 as the ?simplified bi-color.?
In 1963, XHGC began the first commercial color transmissions, broadcast to televisions in ten shopping centers in Mexico City, where the general public could enjoy them for free.
Unfortunately, in 1965 Gonzalez Camarena died in a tragic automobile accident.
This brilliant Latin American, without even reaching the age of 50 and working entirely in his own country of Mexico, managed to excel in a field traditionally reserved for scientists in first world countries.
I bought an HDTV tuner ($400) and attached it to a standard 19" computer monitor (under $100), so I had a passable OTA HDTV system for under $500. The image size was pretty much the same as the that of the 20" NTSC TV it replaced.
The two downsides were:So I eventually replaced the 19" computer monitor with a widescreen HDTV monitor with integrated NTSC tuner that had been a demo model. Still, the whole thing was under $1000.
Samsung HDTV tuners like mine seem to be selling for under $150 on ebay these days, so perhaps the subject of this post should be "under $250" is possible. Or heck, my cable company says I can rent an HD cable box for an additional $4 month (though I don't know if it has a VGA output), but I'm happy with over-tho-air.
You write your nine symphonies, then you die.
Cause the improvements I've seen over the last 20 years don't qualify as Ironic.
When I was a kid, we got two and a half channels with crummy reception. A few years later, we got a 15 foot dish and watched much better signals before the channels started encrypting....but they STILL had issues with sparklies when sunspots were active....18-32 analog channels on 10-15 satellites, requiring a dish to rotate to get to them. Then we went to an 18" dish that gets 150+ channels on two satellites that don't require repositioning, and all look uniformly good (some compression artifacting) especially when compared to two and a half channels in the late 1970s.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
No improvements??!! Don't you remember "vert. hold" and having to adjust that up until sometime in the 80's. IC-based PLL circuitry has really improved TV since the transistor and tube days.
Actually, the problem is that the frame rate is not an exact integer multiple of the 60Hz AC power frequency, which is usually the largest source of electrical noise. It's off by a fraction of a percent; that's why you often see a distortion slowly creeping up the screen about once per minute as the frame rate beats against the power line sine wave. If the frame rate were exactly locked to the power line frequency, the distortion wouldn't move, so you wouldn't notice it.
Uhhh... Okay. Credentials: Former professional video technician (at the SkyDome in Toronto) before being hired to design radar video systems for Litton. Also an avid collector and restorer of early television sets.
In the 1950s, AC power was not universal, especially in rural areas (note the sustained popularity of the "All American Five" AC/DC table radio at that time). Lots of places had DC, and lots of cities had 25Hz power well into the late 1950s. Nor was it necessarily going to be in sync from one town to the next, so you couldn't guarantee that the 60Hz powerline hum could be synchronized with the TV station's 60Hz vertical signal. In other words, you couldn't be guaranteed that the hum was going to happen in the vertical blanking interval (that black bar you see rolling when the vertical hold control is set wrong).
I suspect that the vertical was chosen to be at 60Hz more because the large current draw of the vertical output tube driving the deflection yoke would then be more likely to occur during the charge cycle of the set's filter capacitors, allowing smaller capacitors to be used (cheaper). This of course being a time when electrolytic filter capacitors (in fact, all small parts) were still hand made.
Even more importantly, you should remember that most early TV sets (until the advent of selenium rectifiers in about 1955) had full-wave rectifiers, generally using a 5U4 or similar tube. A full-wave rectifier folds the negative half of the sinewave up to the positive side, which effectively doubles the frequency to 120Hz.
Either way, if the set is operating correctly, regardless of color standard, you will not see any powerline artifacts or ripple. It's when the horizontal system starts to come out of resonance that the biggest current draw happens in the set. Your horizontal output tube (transistor) consumes the most power of any part of the set; if a typical 1950s DuMont or Admiral has a cathode current of 120mA (at ~300V) and you misadjust the horizontal hold, that current will spike to over double that. That will load down the set's power supply, discharge the filter capacitors more, and you might start to hear 120Hz (full wave rectifier at 60Hz) hum in the set's speaker.
IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier.
Yup. The original NTSC standard was 30FPS; when the 3.58MHz sinewave which carries color was added, the bandwidth of the signal had to be increased. (The original was 3.5MHz bandwidth for the image; reducing the frame rate slightly was sufficient to keep the bandwidth inside the original spectrum and didn't screw up many of the existing TV sets.)
Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.
Note that the NTSC color TV standard was adopted in 1953, though not implemented until 50 years ago today. Every TV set built since then has known about the new frame rate the sets would have to handle. I actively collect and restore early TV sets, and I only have a few which predate this - they're rate.
Again, you don't get powerline beat in the picture unless something is wrong with the set's filter capacitors.
If you're getting a beat in the picture which, on a blank raster, moves in time with the vertical hold control, then you've got a problem where the vertical is either consuming too much current, or a
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Actually Color TV is older than 50 years. And it was developed by a mexican engineer.
Some links for you to explore:Ronald knows better
Another history on the subject
Quoted in slashdot on a previous article
George Brown's book, "Part of Which I Was" covers the history of his time at RCA. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but he sounds like a good guy.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on