Comments on: Colorvision’s Colorful Genius

By: jayessell

jayessell — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:42:26 +0000

Comment #1-

Here’s an article about the development of the two color systems
and the battle for the all electronic RCA format:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/color_war.html

By: jayessell

jayessell — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:53:05 +0000

Mr G….
1) This means the 3DTV system with the best 2D compatibility will probably become the standard.

Intel’s 3D movie system could be adapted to home use with a frame-sequential left eye view / right eye view
and alternating polarized light LCD illuminators.

(Suitable for the 3D movies Coriline and Monsters vs Aliens.)

The Phillips 3DTV system (See the YouTube) is goggle-less but has less backward compatibility.
It’s meant for point-of-sale store displays anyway.

By: MrG

MrG — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 01:53:26 +0000

That’s an interesting notion — I imagine it wouldn’t have been all that hard to do, just gating
three electron beams one at a time for each color field, instead of all three at once as for an NTSC
set. Even with vacuum-tube electronics the counting system would have only needed a few tubes.

If Goldmark had been a bit faster off the mark, CBS might have won out. TV was ready to go when it was sidelined by WWII, and by the time CBS was pushing sequential color monochrome monochrome TV was already becoming established. However, Goldmark was unsurprisingly working on miltech during the conflict. Early signals receivers were manual — the operator had to dial through bands to pick up an enemy radar — and so Goldmark invented the automatic channel scanner, which emerged as the AN/APR-2 automatic receiver system. I recall that it was hard to develop; some folks needled Goldmark by saying its greatest contribution to the war effort would be to give one to the enemy so they could bust their heads trying to reverse-engineer it. Cheers — MrG / http://www.vectorsite.net/gblog.html

By: George

George — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:24:49 +0000

If sequential color had remained the standard, I imagine the wheel would have been replaced by some sort of tri-color display and electronics. I remember seeing an announcement of a system that used a color wheel on a monochrome tube with electronics that converted NTSC to sequential fields.

By: David Moisan

David Moisan — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:42:52 +0000

What really killed the color wheel was scale. It’s easy to put a wheel on a DLP or a 5″ CRT, not so easy for 19″. 16:9 screens today would be a horror to put a wheel on.

By: Torgo

Torgo — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:54:11 +0000

He didn’t really invent sequential color. Movies first used the spinning color wheel idea back in 1912.

By: Gregly

Gregly — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:57:39 +0000

The funny thing is that DLP projectors have brought Goldmark’s idea back, after a fashion: a color wheel spins across the DLP mirrors to produce the fields. This is why some people see a “rainbow effect” on DLP-projected images, especially if they move their eyes or heads quickly.

By: MrG

MrG — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:37:41 +0000

There’s an enormous story behind this. Goldmark’s scheme was workable but it involved sending red-green-blue images sequentially, using a synchronized color filter wheel in the receiver set. The FCC actually accepted the CBS / Goldmark scheme as a standard, but RCA refused to give up and kept on working on their own color scheme … which just happened to be compatible with existing monochrome TV, in essence adding a second color signal to the mono signal so a mono set could pick up color broadcasts by simply ignoring the color signal. The RCA scheme was much more difficult to get to work but compatibility won out. (And now in about two weeks it will be history in the USA.)

The Goldmark scheme was fine in itself, and in during the Apollo program NASA had a sequential color camera built for astronauts to take to the Moon. Regular color TV cameras were huge in those days and they were just too big for the flight. They had to implement a translation system on the receiving end. Cheers — MrG / http://www.vectorsite.net/gblog.html