[78-L] Dragnet Xmas Album (Was: Re: Rochester)

[David Breneman]

 From: Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com>

(Cut to the summary)


> If you look
> at the beginning weeks of NTSC color you would not see it developing any
> faster as far as programs, stations, and sets made and sold.  How was it
> faring in Feb 1954???

The owners of existing B&W sets didn't care how is was faring
because they didn't have to.  They could receive broadcasts on
their existing sets without modification.  To modify an NTSC_1
set to display a CBS color signal may have required only about
$5 in parts (in 1950 dollars) but it also required the cost of
assembling those parts and performing modifications to the
set's sweep circuits which resulted in a duplication of that 
part of the chassis, and frequently required an additional
"set top box" to contain the new circuitry.

> The existing CBS color wheel sets show them to be
> not all that much more cumbersome but much less complicated as some of
> the first NTSC sets.

They had small screens.  Certainly you've seen DuMont's
demonstration set that required something like a 6 foot
diameter filter wheel to display a 25" picture.  The
drum-type sets were more compact, but they still took
up a lot of real estate in a living room compared to the
size of picture they delivered.

> DuMont was trying to push his giant 30-inch set
> which is why he wanted high-def, but that would have required a similar
> modification to all the sets on the market and in the home much like the
> CBS color system -- and the move up to color was much more exciting than
> the move to hi-def would have been.  

But what a lot of people lose sight of is that it wasn't just
Evil Sarnoff vs. Munificent Someone Else.  There were a lot of
companies jockeying for advantage, including one of the largest,
Zenith, which was cool to the whole idea of television since is
threatened their lead in the radio market, and were dead-set against
color.  NTSC-2 color took a long time to take off, much to RCA's
dismay, precisely because it gave the customer the ability to decide
when and where he was going to adopt it.  The CBS system was a
"convert or die" approach, and we haven't even discussed the
fairly low resolution of that system required to get the frame
rate up to reduce flicker and color-ghosting on rapidly
moving objects.  (Those image problems would have become much
more obvious when all-electronic home display systems became
available in the later 1950s.)  The US may have had to re-engineer
its TV standards by the late 60s or early 70s much as Europe did
with the introduction of PAL, and we'd now be on our third, rather
than second, system-wide round of forced obsolescence.