Editing Television (section)

===Color===
{{main|Color television}}
[[File:Samsung LED TV.jpg|thumb|right|Samsung LED TV]]
The basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a color image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built. Although he gave no practical details, among the earliest published proposals for television was one by Maurice Le Blanc in 1880 for a color system, including the first mentions in television literature of line and frame scanning.<ref>M. Le Blanc, "Etude sur la transmission électrique des impressions lumineuses", ''La Lumière Electrique'', vol. 11, 1 December 1880, pp. 477–81.</ref> Polish inventor [[Jan Szczepanik]] patented a color television system in 1897, using a [[selenium]] photoelectric cell at the transmitter and an electromagnet controlling an oscillating mirror and a moving prism at the receiver. But his system contained no means of analyzing the spectrum of colors at the transmitting end and could not have worked as he described it.<ref>R.W. Burns, ''Television: An International History of the Formative Years'', IET, 1998, p. 98. {{ISBN|0-85296-914-7}}.</ref> Another inventor, [[Hovannes Adamian]], also experimented with color television as early as 1907. The first color television project is claimed by him,<ref>Western technology and Soviet economic development: 1945 to 1965, by Antony C. Sutton, Business & Economics – 1973, p. 330</ref> and was patented in Germany on 31 March 1908, patent No. 197183, then in Britain, on 1 April 1908, patent No. 7219,<ref>The History of Television, 1880–1941, by Albert Abramson, 1987, p. 27</ref> in France (patent No. 390326) and in Russia in 1910 (patent No. 17912).<ref name="tvmuseum.ru">{{Cite web|url=http://www.tvmuseum.ru/attach.asp?a_no=1018|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130424162531/http://www.tvmuseum.ru/attach.asp?a_no=1018|url-status=usurped|title=A. Rokhlin, Tak rozhdalos' dal'novidenie (in Russian)|archivedate=24 April 2013}}</ref>

Scottish inventor [[John Logie Baird]] demonstrated the world's first color transmission on 3 July 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color, and three light sources at the receiving end, with a [[commutator (electric)|commutator]] to alternate their illumination.<ref>John Logie Baird, [https://www.google.com/patents?id=JRVAAAAAEBAJ Television Apparatus and the Like] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130518084511/http://www.google.com/patents?id=JRVAAAAAEBAJ |date=18 May 2013 }}, U.S. patent, filed in U.K. in 1928.</ref> Baird also made the world's first color broadcast on 4 February 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's [[The Crystal Palace|Crystal Palace]] studios to a projection screen at London's [[Dominion Theatre]].<ref>Baird Television: [http://www.bairdtelevision.com/crystalpalace.html Crystal Palace Television Studios]. Previous color television demonstrations in the U.K. and U.S. had been via closed circuit.</ref> Mechanically scanned color television was also demonstrated by [[Bell Laboratories]] in June 1929 using three complete systems of [[Solar cell|photoelectric cells]], amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full-color image.

The first practical hybrid system was again pioneered by John Logie Baird. In 1940 he publicly demonstrated a color television combining a traditional black-and-white display with a rotating colored disk. This device was very "deep" but was later improved with a mirror folding the light path into an entirely practical device resembling a large conventional console.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.bairdtelevision.com/colour.html|title=The World's First High Definition Colour Television System|access-date=22 March 2015}}</ref> However, Baird was unhappy with the design, and, as early as 1944, had commented to a British government committee that a fully electronic device would be better.

In 1939, Hungarian engineer [[Peter Carl Goldmark]] introduced an electro-mechanical system while at [[CBS]], which contained an [[Iconoscope]] sensor. The CBS field-sequential color system was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode-ray tube inside the receiver set.<ref>Peter C. Goldmark, assignor to Columbia Broadcasting System, "Color Television", [https://patents.google.com/patent/US2480571 U.S. Patent 2,480,571], filed 7 September 1940.</ref> The system was first demonstrated to the [[Federal Communications Commission]] (FCC) on 29 August 1940 and shown to the press on 4 September.<ref>Current Broadcasting 1940</ref><ref name=ColorTVSuccess>"Color Television Success in Test", ''The New York Times'', 30 August 1940, p. 21.</ref><ref>"Color Television Achieves Realism", ''The New York Times'', 5 September 1940, p. 18.</ref><ref>"[https://books.google.com/books?id=JScDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA120 New Television System Transmits Images in Full Color]", ''Popular Science'', December 1940, p. 120.</ref>

CBS began experimental color field tests using film as early as 28 August 1940 and live cameras by 12 November.<ref name="ColorTVSuccess" /><ref>"CBS Demonstrates Full-Color Television," ''The Wall Street Journal'', 5 September 1940, p. 1. "Television Hearing Set," ''The New York Times'', 13 November 1940, p. 26.</ref> [[NBC]] (owned by RCA) made its first field test of color television on 20 February 1941. CBS began daily color field tests on 1 June 1941.<ref>Ed Reitan, [http://colortelevision.info/rca-nbc_firsts.html RCA-NBC Color Firsts in Television (commented)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150204092411/http://colortelevision.info/rca-nbc_firsts.html |date=4 February 2015 }}.</ref> These color systems were not compatible with existing black-and-white [[television sets]], and, as no color television sets were available to the public at this time, viewing of the color field tests was restricted to RCA and CBS engineers and the invited press. The [[War Production Board]] halted the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from 22 April 1942 to 20 August 1945, limiting any opportunity to introduce color television to the general public.<ref>"Making of Radios and Phonographs to End April 22", ''The New York Times'', 8 March 1942, p. 1. "Radio Production Curbs Cover All Combinations," ''The Wall Street Journal,'' 3 June 1942, p. 4. "WPB Cancels 210 Controls; Radios, Trucks in Full Output", ''New York Times'', 21 August 1945, p. 1.</ref><ref>Bob Cooper, "[http://www.earlytelevision.org/color_tv_cooper.html Television: The Technology That Changed Our Lives]", Early Television Foundation.</ref>

As early as 1940, Baird had started work on a fully electronic system he called [[Telechrome]]. Early Telechrome devices used two electron guns aimed at either side of a phosphor plate. The phosphor was patterned so the electrons from the guns only fell on one side of the patterning or the other. Using cyan and magenta phosphors, a reasonable limited-color image could be obtained. He also demonstrated the same system using monochrome signals to produce a 3D image (called "[[Stereoscopy|stereoscopic]]" at the time). A demonstration on 16 August 1944 was the first example of a practical color television system. Work on the Telechrome continued, and plans were made to introduce a three-gun version for full color. However, Baird's untimely death in 1946 ended the development of the Telechrome system.<ref>Albert Abramson, ''The History of Television, 1942 to 2000'', McFarland & Company, 2003, pp. 13–14. {{ISBN|0-7864-1220-8}}</ref><ref>Baird Television: [http://www.bairdtelevision.com/colour.html The World's First High Definition Colour Television System].</ref>
Similar concepts were common through the 1940s and 1950s, differing primarily in the way they re-combined the colors generated by the three guns. The [[Geer tube]] was similar to Baird's concept but used small pyramids with the phosphors deposited on their outside faces instead of Baird's 3D patterning on a flat surface. The [[Penetron]] used three layers of phosphor on top of each other and increased the power of the beam to reach the upper layers when drawing those colors. The [[Chromatron]] used a set of focusing wires to select the colored phosphors arranged in vertical stripes on the tube.

One of the great technical challenges of introducing color [[broadcast television]] was the desire to conserve [[bandwidth (signal processing)|bandwidth]], potentially three times that of the existing [[black-and-white]] standards, and not use an excessive amount of [[radio spectrum]]. In the United States, after considerable research, the [[NTSC|National Television Systems Committee]]<ref name=name>National Television System Committee (1951–1953), [Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplementary references cited in the Reports, and the Petition for adoption of transmission standards for color television before the Federal Communications Commission, n.p., 1953], 17 v. illus., diagrams., tables. 28 cm. LC Control No.:54021386 [http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First Library of Congress Online Catalog]</ref> approved an all-electronic system developed by [[RCA]], which encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and significantly reduced the resolution of the color information to conserve bandwidth. As black-and-white televisions could receive the same transmission and display it in black-and-white, the color system adopted is [backwards] "compatible." ("Compatible Color," featured in RCA advertisements of the period, is mentioned in the song "[[America (West Side Story song)|America]]," of [[West Side Story]], 1957.) The brightness image remained compatible with existing black-and-white television sets at slightly reduced resolution. In contrast, color televisions could decode the extra information in the signal and produce a limited-resolution color display. The higher-resolution black-and-white and lower-resolution color images combine in the brain to produce a seemingly high-resolution color image. The NTSC standard represented a significant technical achievement.

[[File:SMPTE Color Bars.svg|thumb|left|Color bars used in a [[test pattern]], sometimes used when no program material is available]]
The first color broadcast (the first episode of the live program ''[[The Marriage (American TV series)|The Marriage]]'') occurred on 8 July 1954. However, during the following ten years, most network broadcasts and nearly all local programming continued to be black-and-white. It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965, in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that fall. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 1972, the last holdout among daytime network programs converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season.

Early color sets were either floor-standing console models or tabletop versions nearly as bulky and heavy, so in practice they remained firmly anchored in one place. [[General Electric|GE]]'s relatively compact and lightweight [[Porta-Color]] set was introduced in the spring of 1966. It used a [[transistor]]-based [[UHF television broadcasting|UHF tuner]].<ref>{{cite web |title=GE Portacolor |url=http://www.earlytelevision.org/ge_portacolor.html |website=[[Early Television Museum]] |access-date=2 October 2019}}</ref> The first fully transistorized color television in the United States was the [[Quasar (brand)|Quasar]] television introduced in 1967.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Tyson |first1=Kirk |title=Competition in the 21st Century |date=1996 |publisher=[[CRC Press]] |isbn=9781574440324 |page=[https://archive.org/details/competitionin21s00tyso/page/253 253] |url=https://archive.org/details/competitionin21s00tyso|url-access=registration }}</ref> These developments made watching color television a more flexible and convenient proposition.

In 1972, sales of color sets finally surpassed sales of black-and-white sets. Color broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the [[PAL]] format until the 1960s, and broadcasts did not start until 1967. By this point, many of the technical issues in the early sets had been worked out, and the spread of color sets in Europe was fairly rapid. By the mid-1970s, the only stations broadcasting in black-and-white were a few high-numbered UHF stations in small markets and a handful of low-power repeater stations in even smaller markets such as vacation spots. By 1979, even the last of these had converted to color. By the early 1980s, B&W sets had been pushed into niche markets, notably low-power uses, small portable sets, or for use as [[video monitor]] screens in lower-cost consumer equipment. By the late 1980s, even these last holdout niche B&W environments had inevitably shifted to color sets.