William Sommerwerck wrote:

Part of the difficulity in understanding is that perhaps you
don't have experience with early American color televisions...
I certainly remember how in the 60s we had to adjust the tint
control on a regular (show by show) basis, because of lack
of consistancy.

Yes -- a lack of consistency. That was not the fault of NTSC, but of the
broadcasters.


And AT&T who provided the coaxial cables that fed the video to all
the stations on a network. The tint and chroma level could be adjusted
at every facility in the system. I knew someone who worked for AT&T at
the time, and he told me what a pain it was to compensate for the
cable. When the network switched to a different studio or city for a
show, it threw everything out of calibration.


Anyone who had one of those old, tube (valve) color sets,
with the 21" round color CRT, will remember seeing green
skies, and blue grass while having skin colors set to the
proper shade. Get the sky blue, and the skin turned red,
or blue, or green!

I don't think that's correct. The cameras (and/or encoders) would have had
to have been very badly set up for that to happen.

On a related subject... I remember reading long, long ago that the first RCA
color TV had /four/ controls for adjusting the color, which the author
described as a "combination lock"! Anyone know anything about this?


He may be talking about the three 'drive' controls that set the gain
for each channel. These are set up to provide equal gain to get a white
line during setup. They are service adjustments on TVs, but on an early
design they may have been easier to get to. Some TVs still had hollow
plastic shaft extenders that passed through the rear of floor model
cabinets to adjust these and other pots.

The fourth would be the actual dolor intensity control.


--
Lead free solder is Belgium's version of 'Hold my beer and watch this!'