Jul292010
Really Cheap Color TV
Filed under General, History by earle at 8:46 am
Where I grew on the coast of Maine, the people weren’t noted for their technical expertise. When the first televisions came to Searsport, people erected huge antennas aimed at the Boston stations, primarily to see the Red Sox games. The pictures were pretty snowy of course. Sometimes though it was good enough so you could almost make out the baseball. People would gather around, drinking beer and smoking and having fun commenting on the game.
Later, when stations came to Portland and Bangor, the picture quality improved a lot. We were still limited to black & white images on tiny screens. Peddlers from Massachusetts roamed the rural countryside selling used sets that worked at least until the salesman drove away down the road. My first job was as a tv repairman trying to get those old sets with 20 plus tubes working again. We had a tube tester, voltmeter and a good supply of substitute tubes as our only equipment. Needless to say, our efforts sometimes weren’t good enough.
Along with those crappy sets, some people bought new ones. Still though, they were black & white although we heard about color sets coming along. It was a while before our local stations were able to transmit color. However, reading the advertisments in the back of popular magazines were promises of a simple way to make those older sets simulate a color picture.
Our neighbors up the road fell for the spiel. Soon, they were able to see color on their sets. What they had paid good money for was a plastic self-adhesive sheet that was placed on the front of the CRT. The top was colored blue, the center was clear and the bottom was green. For just the right scene, you would see green grass and blue sky. Not bad but there were a few drawbacks. Since they left it on all the time, you would see strange effects like blue faces and green trousers. The picture was dimmer so they turned the brightness up all the way, shortening the life of the expensive crt.
Looking back, I don’t think any of us had a sense of critical analysis. We looked at it, shrugged our shoulders and didn’t say a word. It just wasn’t done. There was enough strangeness around us that one more thing didn’t seem to matter. I’m sure we wouldn’t fall for such an obvious scam now.
Or would we?
Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH
July 29th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Here’s a link that I posted on FB a while back. Great way to go back in time and see what “Popular Science” was talking about at the time.
http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:01617370?rview=1&source=gbs_navlinks_s
July 30th, 2010 at 10:42 am
Interesting, I had never heard of using colored gel to create an ersatz color TV.
Growing up in the 1950/60s Color TV was in its infancy and very expensive. I don’t remember when our family got its first color TV. We used to visit friends who had one in the early 60’s. The price of $500 sticks in my mind. That would be about $3,500 in today’s dollars.
August 1st, 2010 at 8:50 am
My father was stationed in England in 1968 - incredibly to me (age 12 at the time), they had only recently gotten color broadcasting at all, and it was still a real novelty to have a color set. I watched David Frost and The Two Ronnies in B&W….
August 3rd, 2010 at 10:00 am
I remember the “get color TV” ads in the back of Popular Science, showing you the three-color gel they would send by mail.
We grew up with B&W white TVs in the house; when my dad was still single, he won a B&W TV in an Atlanta, Ga store’s drawing. Our first color TV in the house was a “hybrid” TV, with solid-state signal, Intermediate Frequency (IF) and video sections, and tubes for the High Voltage (HV) sections, excepting a potted-diode voltage tripler. We got the set about 1974 or so; prior to that, the kids visited friends houses to see color TV.
My father held off buying color TV for several decades; he said he’d had too much bad encounters with lousy colr TVs on business travel, and didn’t see the need to “rush in”.
Our family rented summer cottages on Half-Moon Lake in Gilmanton, and Long Lake, Naples, Me. for vacations, so WMTW-TV was amongst our few channel choices. I recall a WMTW-TV slide showing a bored penguin leaning an elbow against a large “8″ with the announcer saying “The follwing program is brought to you in LIVELY black & white, on Channel 8″ (As opposed to “Living Color”).
I was made friends in college by repairing a dormmate’s color TV.
The big surprises for me after growing up with B&W TV at home:
1) I didn’t get the “joke” in the 1939 Wizard of Oz move when Dorothy arrives in Munchinland and the world is in color until I saw the braodcast on a color set circa 1978.
2) I recently picked up the Paitrick McGoohan “Prisoner” DVD series, and was surprised it was in color; I had only seen it on a B&W TV.