America was still in black and white in 1954

[LMELTON]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ztRT0pdFWo

[old_tv_nut]

Wow. More AI-voiced crap, written by someone who did 7th-grade level research and glommed onto one scientist's papers. I fear this is evidence that the true history of technology is going to be obliterated in favor of AI hallucinations in the future.

At the start and later the author confuses the Rose Bowl and the Rose Parade. It was the parade that was broadcast in color to a few demonstration receivers across the U.S.

Problems with wrong color had everything to do with circuit drift and nothing whatsoever with the phosphors being wrong. Anyone with the least knowledge knows that the first NTSC sets had the correct phosphor colors, which were quicly followed by revisions to the phosphors that sacrificed the correct hues for more brightness, which was desperately needed as soon as sets went from 15 inch to 21 inch tubes.

6:35 shows the responses of the cone cells in the eye while talking about the phosphor primary colors RGB for a long time withut showing them, then finally mentions the cone cells.

~ 7:39 "The phosphors drifted" - absolutely untrue. There is such a thing as slow phosphor burn in, but this is at an unnoticeable level unless the tube displays stationary high brightness patterns like early video games. Random program material smooths out the burn-in completely.

~10:54 its "phosphors" "in the broad sense," not "phosphorus," dummy.

Ernest Bush (spelling?) may indeed have solved aging problems, but he must have done it before the 15GP22 in 1953, as evidenced by the good tubes we still have. To blame the variation in color programs as written by the newspaper critic on phosphors rather than circuit instability is nonsense. There was no certain direction of color change in receivers from program to program, and long term hange in the picture tubes themselves were due to diminishing emission, the same as black and white tubes.

~13:38 Shows a rare-earth tube spectrum and says RCA was using it in 1953. More confused BS. Rare earth phosphors went into use in the 1960s, solving the low red efficicency problem and becoming normal practice for all subsequent CRTs.

~15:40 shows the emission decay after excitation removal at microsecond time scale, totally irrelevant to the aging problem being discussed. The preceding section also seems to confuse phosphor nonlinearity (which can cause off-color highlights in tubes with high intensity beams, like rear projection sets) with the long term burn in that this video seems to be all about.

~ 16:40 the rare-earth vanadate phosphor was introduced to production much later than the 1953 time frame claimed in the narration.
The following narration about the research appears to be about studying vanadate phosphors and solving a problem prior to their introduction, nothing to do with variations of color in sets that had already been put in production and sold to the public. Again, those variations were due to tube circuit instability and the difficulties of setting up. 3-tube image orthicon cameras.

~18.38 NTSC was not "designed around a wavelength of 611 nanometers." This would be a spec for a laser display. NTSC was designed around the color of a particular red phosphor, which had a broad band of emission compared to a laser.

~20:16 this is obviously work on probems with rare earth phsophors prior to ther introduction into product. RCA published data on vanadate phosphors (and IIRC, used them for a time before going to Yttrium oxysulfide. Before the vanadate, there were a few years of all-sulfide tubes, which were a step up in brightness, but had poorer color as the cadmium sulfide red was quite non-linear and turned orangy at high beam currents.

~21:49 long description of the same scaling up process for production that many other companies were doing for their phosphor development; Sylvania was a major force in rare-earth phosphors, and Motorola had worked on the all-sulfide phosphors that preceded them.

~23:06 The "improvement" in the green phosphor was to go from the orignal Willemite (P1) green to a brighter but incorrectly yellowish sulfide phosphor, not from a fictitious early sulfide green. The 1958 and later tubes mentioned definitely did NOT "match what NTSC was designed to deliver." The brightness of sets improved but the color got worse until set makers changed the gains and angles in the color demodulators to correct skin tones and correct other colors approximately.

~24:07 Shows a late 1960s RCA receiver ad with the stupidly incorrect date of 1954 above it. There were no rectangular tube sets sold before the late 60s.

~27:00 and following. The first sets using the 15GP22 produced correct color, not wrong color as claimed. Any instability was due to the tube circuitry, not the phosphors.
Bush's (sp) work was obviously done to fix problems BEFORE with vanadate before any tubes used it. Later tubes actually produced wrong color in favor of brighter images. Dim images were the problem with early 21 inch sets, not wrong color, as the 21AXP22 used the original NTSC phosphors, and were naturally dimmer than the 15GP22, which scanned roughly the same bean current over a much smaller image.

[ppppenguin]

I live in a PAL country and have grown up with the Never Twice Same Colour stories. Well engineered NTSC is very good indeed. The problem is that making it work well with the valve (tube) technology of the 1950s was a bit too hard. I have personal experience of early solid state PAL encoders. Many drifted horribly.

There is a story, I don't know how true, that the Soviet bloc adopted SECAM for technical reasons. Politically the French "sold" it to them but technically it was a good fit for their huge transmission systems. It's also said that their VTRs "Quad-ski", a Russian copy of the Ampex machines, didn't have the "Colortec" fine timing correction that was needed to replay PAL or NTSC. SECAM just needs monochrome timing accuracy.