The article also raises an interesting question. My understanding is the big difference in North American and British color TV is that NTSC was engineered to be backwards compatible with existing black and white broadcasting standards, this is the source of many of it's sins. While the British system was able to both learn from ntsc's problems and make a cleaner break from black and white.
I guess the question unanswered in the article is did this have anything to do with camera tech used? (4 vs 3 tube)
Well, off the scour the dusty corners of the web to try and learn more about early color television.
This says the main reason for four-tube is image registration. Basically, the incoming light is optically split up into red, green, and blue, and these go to separate sensors. Being separate sensors, they may not be physically aligned. So if you sum R + G + B together to get luminance, the picture will not be sharp.
You can solve this by adding a fourth (black and white) tube for luminance. Since it's just one tube, there is no alignment issue for the luminance part of the picture. And the eye is less sensitive to color, so while the color alignment issues remain, they aren't very noticeable.
At first when I read this, I assume the camera must have to somehow combine the fourth tube's signal with the other three tubes' signals. But since both NTSC and PAL encode luminance and chrominance separately, apparently this isn't necessary. It's the TV that combines them. With a three-tube camera, the sensor signals have to be split into luminance and chrominance. With a four-tube camera, you just take luminance from one sensor and chrominance from the other three sensors.
Reminds me of the alternate, feature-length version of the Twin Peaks pilot, created in case the series was not picked up, in which they continue the storyline set up in the first hour, and resolve the murder mystery by the end. Widely available on home video formats. (Do NOT watch this version if you intend to watch the entire series!)
British TV in that era was enormously, shall we say, frugal. As soon as they discovered videotape, which was both cheaper than film and reusable, they went all in on it. BBC especially (and ITV as well, it appears) often wiped their tapes and recorded over them to save money, since they saw no reason to think anyone would be interested in their shows in the future. For this reason, some early episodes of Doctor Who are lost forever, at least until some foreign TV station finds copies in their vaults, which has happened over the years.
In similar spirit, there was an old US TV show that was popular in Bulgaria.
It was about some typical US family living with the grandad (father's side).
So grandad gets punishes all the times for all the silly things he does, and his punishment involves him getting "pork" instead of "beef"...
Well that "punishment" does not work in Bulgaria (back 20+ years ago) - "pork" was always better back then, not because in general pork is better, but because our "beef" was terrible (cows were mostly for milking)...
So while learning English, and listening to the show - I got super confused why in English they would say one thing, and captions in Bulgarian completely the opposite!
Hence I learned, there is a mastery in localization.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 33.1 ms ] threadI guess the question unanswered in the article is did this have anything to do with camera tech used? (4 vs 3 tube)
Well, off the scour the dusty corners of the web to try and learn more about early color television.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-tube_television_camera
This says the main reason for four-tube is image registration. Basically, the incoming light is optically split up into red, green, and blue, and these go to separate sensors. Being separate sensors, they may not be physically aligned. So if you sum R + G + B together to get luminance, the picture will not be sharp.
You can solve this by adding a fourth (black and white) tube for luminance. Since it's just one tube, there is no alignment issue for the luminance part of the picture. And the eye is less sensitive to color, so while the color alignment issues remain, they aren't very noticeable.
At first when I read this, I assume the camera must have to somehow combine the fourth tube's signal with the other three tubes' signals. But since both NTSC and PAL encode luminance and chrominance separately, apparently this isn't necessary. It's the TV that combines them. With a three-tube camera, the sensor signals have to be split into luminance and chrominance. With a four-tube camera, you just take luminance from one sensor and chrominance from the other three sensors.
It was about some typical US family living with the grandad (father's side).
So grandad gets punishes all the times for all the silly things he does, and his punishment involves him getting "pork" instead of "beef"...
Well that "punishment" does not work in Bulgaria (back 20+ years ago) - "pork" was always better back then, not because in general pork is better, but because our "beef" was terrible (cows were mostly for milking)...
So while learning English, and listening to the show - I got super confused why in English they would say one thing, and captions in Bulgarian completely the opposite!
Hence I learned, there is a mastery in localization.