The Low Acuity for Blue: Perceptual Technics and American Color Television

Abstract

This article offers a perceptual history of American color television through a study of the making of the National Television Systems Committee’s 1953 color standard. Rather than seeking out an ideal representation of color, the NTSC standard asked what the minimally acceptable level of color transmission might be for home audiences. While exploiting psychophysical research that suggested that normal eyes tended to have a lower acuity for blue, the NTSC also set their aesthetic standards according to rough measures of everyday life. The NTSC thus mobilized a conception of vision essential for modern commercial culture. The authors consider the perceptual engineering of color TV as a path into a neglected but crucial dimension of 20th-century visuality: compression. The history of color TV shows the centrality of compression to the look of many 20th-century visual media – analog and digital – and to the cultures of looking in which they circulated.

Radio/Television/Sound: Radio Aesthetics and Perceptual Technics in Early American Television

“…This model is not only applicable to aural phenomena, as the development of an NTSC standard for color television relied on the same kind of reasoning, one in which "compression, rather than verisimilitude" was the driving industrial rationale. 26 Yet what both the examples of telephony and color television do not demonstrate is the extent to which communications systems may function to convey information via more than one sense, as in the pervasive coupling of sound and image that dominates much of the 20th-century media landscape, and how this can introduce different considerations into a perceptual regime that still privileges compression and profit maximization over strict verisimilitude. As the remaining sections of this essay explore, the first round of NTSC hearings, prior to those that decided a standard for color television, also operated according to a logic similar to that of Sterne's notion of perceptual technics, although these decisions were made according a logic in which perception was assumed to be multisensory, and the presence of noise was taken as a given part of the communication system.…”

Scenes from an Imaginary Country

“…The NTSC built the limits of color perception (as they were then understood) into its color TV standard, rendering them economically useful by treating the presumed perceptual limits of the normal human eye as an exploitable efficiency in the system. In today's language of bandwidth, the NTSC system could transmit less information if it knew which information was less likely to be seen by audiences (Sterne and Mulvin 2014). But the committee's perceptual judgments were made in the artificial context of testing and built around specific aesthetic materials: Eastman Kodak's twenty-seven color images.…”