[Gorzaloon]

On the other hand, television is someone else's vision."

Yes, that is one of the problems. It it the vision of Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather, usually, and their vision is that of a glorious May Day Parade.

[nathanbedford]

Ah... does anybody else remember the advent of black and white? The age of color seems like yesterday just before this thing called a fax machine which I am told is now practically obsolete.

If anybody out there has a copy of MY FIFTY YEARS AT THE NEW JERSEY BAR by Robert McCarter he will find in the introduction his fascination in 1885 on encountering a male clerk in the show window of Bamberger's department store operating a new fangled contraption called the typewriter. The author said that he wondered if the new invention would somehow change the practice of law.

Now, how can I get one of them picture phones?

[PJ-Comix]

Weren't the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 broadcast in color? BTW, I once found a book with color photos from WWI (not WWII, WWI). I was absolutely transfixed by those color photos.

[weegee]

In this age of PDAs, picture phones and gigantic plasma TVs, it's hard to believe anyone ever survived without color television. Imagine for a moment Greg Brady's bell-bottoms, Bill Cosby's sweaters, or your favorite college basketball team in black and white.

My household had a black and white teevee up until the mid 1970s. My grandmother had a big color tv though.

I also had a small black and white 12" portable tv in college in the mid-1980s.

I am one of those of Generation X who remember tuning in UHF channels that would "sort of" come in to see all sorts of movies, cartoons, and reruns.

Having grown up with analog broadcast of radio and television and scratchy records, I can't easily be sold on the the "improvements" of DVD over laserdisc (I still notice the artifacting in DVD compression and thing it is a technology that is still far from perfection). I'm also congizent enough to notice that a "widescreen" tv does not conform to the dimensions of many movies (so you will STILL have those black bars on the top and bottom of the screen) AND you will have new black bars on the left and right of the screen when you watch any tv programming from the first 48 years of television history (as well as almost all movies before 1955).

[weegee]

"Color was obviously a major improvement to service," Reitan said. "The networks started developing programming based on color -- musicals, variety shows and 'color spectaculars' -- that many people still remember. It really changed the style of television."

I think that the garrish colors in a number of movies even through the 1960s are because while they were filmed "in color", they still maintained a grey scale that could be easily viewed on black and white tvs already in the market. Certainly when black and white movies were filmed they considered what the resulting grey scale would look like.

Today, you can take a movie like "The 7 Faces Of Dr. Lao" and turn the color completely off and not be confused as to the action on the screen.