NTSC Color Television Field Test

Decola, Rinaldo; Shelby, Robert E.; McIlwain, Knox

doi:10.1109/jrproc.1954.274603

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…They were chosen from the ranks of professions concerned with television, and the list is revealing for its repetitive nature: engineers who designed TV receivers, broadcast engineers, engineers in "communications equipment design," television research engineers, television transmitter design engineers, and editorial writers for technical journals. The tests also had observers: teachers (what kind is unclear), television service engineers, and consulting engineers (DeCola, Shelby, and McIlwain 1954). On one level, the list is highly exclusive, consisting primarily of different kinds of engineers and the people who write for them or teach them; on the other, the sheer proliferation of types of engineers in the list shows that they hoped to approach the problem from all angles within the engineering profession.…”

Section: Watching the Future Watchersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scenes from an Imaginary Country

Mulvin

Sterne

2015

Television & New Media

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American analog color television—so-called NTSC color—is likely the most pervasive image standard of the twentieth century, yet it is infamous for its technical shortcomings. Through a history and analysis of the National Television System Committee (NTSC) standard, this article argues that the political presuppositions of engineers shaped the representational capacities of television for nearly sixty years. In particular, the test images used to develop a perceptually satisfying image evince assumptions of a leisurely and white United States as the “normal” subject matter of television. In this way, test materials coalesce abstract assumptions about the normal and the exceptional at the level of both form and content. This article concludes that NTSC color served as a model for how normed cultural sensibilities about image quality, perceptual ability, and the representational imaginary have been built into subsequent technical standards. A Scalar version of this paper, with more pictures, is available at http://colortvstandards.net

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Section: Watching the Future Watchersmentioning

confidence: 99%