Quote:
Originally Posted by old_tv_nut
The Motorola chassis with the single-tube color section needed an adjustment because changing the single tube would change the grayscale tracking. Nevertheless, they eliminated the control in the very cheapest sets.
It's interesting that Magnavox and others put the control in as a feature, when they did not need it. I have always thought of it as one more way for the customer to screw up the picture.
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My Insignia flat screen has a button on the remote labeled "picture", which brings up a menu of options for adjusting several screen parameters including color temperature. I don't bother with those controls for the very reason you mentioned: because misadjusting them can all too easily ruin a perfectly good color picture. Many people never got the hang of adjusting the color temperature control on older sets (known variously as color fidelity, Chromix [Sears], Chromatone [Magnavox], et al.) and often settled for watching a terrible color picture; they did not realize that this control injects a soft blue or red color into a black-and-white picture, and is not disabled during color programming -- which is why misadjustment of the control could and all too often did make a terrible mess of a color program picture. On the other hand, some folks did not even know the color temperature control was there in the first place, so it remained at the b&w (neutral) midpoint setting for the life of the set. I wouldn't be surprised if the color-fidelity, etc. controls on these TVs wound up extremely dirty (in the case of a switch, such as Magnavox's Chromatone which was located, strangely, on the back of the set) or even frozen in the neutral position (for variable potentiometers as used in most other sets) from years or decades of disuse. IMHO, the day this control was eliminated from all color TVs was a red-letter one, since it removed one more way the set owner could wreck the picture. Hiding the color-temperature, etc. adjustments in on-screen menus is another way to prevent this, as most people don't use those adjustments anyway in this age of plug-and-play TVs. I doubt if many viewers are even aware that such adjustments even exist.
Many if not most non-technical viewers today are content just to turn on the set, select the channel they want to watch, set the volume, and forget the rest.