front cover of Bright Signals
Bright Signals
A History of Color Television
Susan Murray
Duke University Press, 2018
First demonstrated in 1928, color television remained little more than a novelty for decades as the industry struggled with the considerable technical, regulatory, commercial, and cultural complications posed by the medium. Only fully adopted by all three networks in the 1960s, color television was imagined as a new way of seeing that was distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It also inspired compelling popular, scientific, and industry conversations about the use and meaning of color and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. In Bright Signals Susan Murray traces these wide-ranging debates within and beyond the television industry, positioning the story of color television, which was replete with false starts, failure, and ingenuity, as central to the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture. In so doing, she shows how color television disrupted and reframed the very idea of television while it simultaneously revealed the tensions about technology's relationship to consumerism, human sight, and the natural world.
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front cover of The Struggle for Unity
The Struggle for Unity
Colour television, the formative years
Russell W. Burns
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008
The Struggle for Unity: Colour television, the formative years traces the evolution of colour television from 1928, when rudimentary colour television was demonstrated for the first time, to c.1966, when the NTSC system and its variants, the PAL and SECAM systems, became widely available for the entertainment, education and enlightenment of society. Among the many topics discussed in the book, mention is made of the following: compatibility and non-compatibility; mechanical and all-electronic systems; field, line and dot sequential scanning; bandwidth constraints and band-sharing techniques; the CBS-RCA conflict; the relative merits of the different systems; the attempt to achieve unity of purpose in Europe; standards; and the development of colour cameras and display tubes. The book, which is based predominantly on written primary source material, does not simply provide a chronicle of dates and descriptions of events, devices and systems. Rather, it discusses the essential factors of colour television history from a general, technical and political viewpoint. Great care has been taken to ensure that an unbiased, accurate and balanced history has been written. Numerous references are given at the end of each chapter and the book is profusely illustrated.
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