[78-L] Early color TV (was Dragnet Xmas Album (Was: Re: Rochester))

[Michael Biel]

From: Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com>
>> 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???

From: David Breneman <david_breneman at yahoo.com>
> 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.

What I also said was how many color shows were on?  How many stations
were they on?  How many companies had sets on the market?  How many sets
been built and in the stores?  How many studios had been equipped for
color?  The start was also slow, slower than the CBS color wheel. 
Westinghouse came out with their set (based on the RCA chassis and
picture tube) several weeks before RCA's first sit hit the market in
APRIL 1954.  http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_ct-100.html

> To modify an NTSC_1 set to display a CBS color signal may have required
> only about $5 in parts (in 1950 dollars)

... on a $300 to $1000 set (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.

ALL of the CBS colorwheel sets DID have that dual circuitry, and it was
not complicated, and would have not required a set top box on any set. 
Labor costs were low back then -- a service call might be $5 to get your
set modified.    Besides, this was not the first time that sets had to
be modified for standards change.  It had already happened with the
change from 441 to 525 lines in 1941.  I'll admit that the difference
was, in addition to the smaller number of sets in use, there was no
switch needed because the old standard was dropped, but there was
precedent.  
  
>> 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.  

15-inches, larger than many B&W on the market, and the same as the first
NTSC color sets three years later. 

> Certainly you've seen DuMont's demonstration set that required something
> like a 6 foot diameter filter wheel to display a 25" picture.  

There were NO 25-inch B&W sets on the market until the mid-60s with the
exception of that HUGE 30-inch set DuMont had.  Have you ever seen one
of THOSE in person?  There's one in the museum.  It extends into the
room over 3-feet, and is maybe 4-feet by 5-feet. 
http://www.earlytelevision.org/images/DuMont-RA118.jpg  The photo of
DuMont with the prototype shows he had no problems with it being a foot
taller than him.  http://www.earlytelevision.org/images/xlg_big_tv.jpg  

> 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.

Not really.  http://www.earlytelevision.org/ntsc_drum_rcvr.html  This is
smaller than the first NTSC color sets with the same size picture.  Go
to the museum and see the actual sets.  The wheel sets are not as large
as you imagine. 
http://www.earlytelevision.org/images/Gray_Research-hd.jpg  This is a
studio monitor so compare it with a monitor.  Remember that the chassis
is as simple as a B&W set, so that takes up no more real estate or
electricity than a B&W set.  The NTSC color sets -- also with 15-inch
screens until 1956 -- had about 45 tubes on two chassis. 
http://www.earlytelevision.org/images/rca_ct-100.jpg   As for the
proposed color adapters for B&W sets, here's an example that is not too
bad in size.  http://www.earlytelevision.org/crosley_converter.html  The
proposed set is much smaller than the eventual NTSC color set.

>> 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. 

Zenith jumped into TV with both feet, pushing the round screen with the
zoom control on a wire. 
http://www.earlytelevision.org/zenith_28t926.html  and a pay TV system
they as thought about in 1931 but went to work earnestly in 1947. 
http://www.earlytelevision.org/phonevision.html  

> 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,

You didn't have to convert to color, only to the different scanning
rate.

> 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.

The color wheel sets which are working don't show those problems.

>  (Those image problems would have become much more obvious when
> all-electronic home display systems became available in the later 1950s.) 

At the museum they can run a disc set next to a CT-100 with the same
source so you can compare the CBS system with the first available NTSC
color sets. And on the other side of the room are the round tube 21-inch
sets from 1956.

> 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.

The only changes Europe made were dropping the 405 line system in
England and the 819 line system in France -- no changes were made
anywhere else.  In both cases they ran both systems simultaneously for
many years.  The final turnoff of a 405 transmitter happened in 1984
when they determined that everybody had gotten dual or new standard sets
-- B&W or color. In both countries the 625 line system was UHF only, so
it freed up VHF in both England and France and allowed for the expansion
of the FM radio band to the full 88-108.  But in the rest of Europe the
introduction of PAL, SECAM, or MESECAM was painless and required no new
sets and minimal modification to the transmitters.     

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com