Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!bu.edu!telecom-request From: jeh@dcs.simpact.com (Jamie Hanrahan) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Early Color Television Message-ID: Date: 22 Feb 91 22:25:30 GMT Sender: news@bu.edu.bu.edu Organization: Simpact Associates, San Diego CA Lines: 48 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 150, Message 7 of 8 In article , sjr@m-net.ann-arbor.mi.us (Sander J. Rabinowitz) writes: > B> Richard Budd (18 Feb 91 20:15 CDT) > B> Color television wasn't rare, but color television programming > B> certainly was before 1965. CBS being the last holdout. At least part of the first season of _Mission: Impossible_ (Fall of '66, the ones with Stephen Hill playing Dan Briggs as head of the IMF) was filmed in glorious black and white. And THAT, my friends, was one of the highest-budget shows in tv at the time (yes, Paramount was pait more $ per episode for M:I than for Star Trek) > What I find amazing was that there was technology to _record_ color TV > through videotape in the early 50's. I believe that was done with the > late Mary Martin's "Peter Pan" TV special in 1954, and that has got to > be the earliest videotape on record. I spent some time hanging around Loyola Marymount (LA area) College's TV Arts department in '72 or so. Those were the days when color was just about everywhere and the big Ampex 2" quad VTRs were king. Loyola had TWO of them along with the editing console, the HS100 slow-motion disk machine and the HS200 programmer to go with it, two Norelco color cameras, a Grass Valley switcher, the works ... everything but a transmitter. The point of this rambling is that it is absolutely incredible to me that one can buy, for just $200, a machine that will put two hours of video on a spool of tape that can fit in a pocket (if you take it out of the cassette). Or less than a thousand for an S-VHS machine that has better horizontal resolution than those Ampex's had. Sure, it's not genlocked, and the chroma bandwidth and noise aren't very good, but the fact that such inexpensive boxes can do this job AT ALL is pretty damn amazing. Yes, yes, Pat, I know, this should go in rec.video. Jamie Hanrahan, Simpact Associates, San Diego CA Internet: jeh@dcs.simpact.com, or if that fails, jeh@crash.cts.com Uucp: ...{crash,scubed,decwrl}!simpact!jeh [Moderator's Note: And to rec.video it must go -- or go *somewhere* anyway! A final message from SJR follows immediatly, to close the thread where telecom is concerned. PAT]