By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 1998; Page H15
When Jay Leno's family got its first color TV set in 1965, it was a revelation.
"My father never got one until it was 'perfected,'" recalls the "Tonight Show" host. The colors bled and the channel tuner quit after five weeks, but the Lenos were mesmerized. "Something happened that I've never seen happen since. The whole family gathered in front of the set and went like this: 'Oooh! Aaah!'"
Will HDTV prove as big a deal?
It's an irresistible comparison: The transition from the current "analog" system of TV broadcasting to digital technology, more than one observer has noted, is a lot like the conversion from black-and-white to color TV more than a generation ago.
Both featured new products with a gee-whiz, first-on-your-block excitement about them. Both required the spending of big money on equipment, by viewers and TV stations alike. Both were greeted with deep skepticism upon introduction.
And if the parallel holds, the switch to digital will move very slowly. Though color TVs are in virtually every American home today, it took a decade after their introduction to make it into even 5 percent of them. This was a result of the big price tags on the early sets and a general lack of color programming the same knocks made against digital sets today.
Still, color sets did take hold. For most baby boomers, the arrival of their family's first was an event never forgotten, a milestone in domestic affluence and quality of life.
Experiments in color transmission date to the late 1920s. One year after television made its public debut as a black-and-white medium at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, CBS showed off a working prototype of a colorcasting system.
But the advent of color was forestalled by World War II. It wasn't until 1950, with black-and-white TV in full swing, that CBS persuaded the Federal Communications Commission to certify its mechanical "flywheel" system as the industry standard (the system created color images by rotating red, green and blue transparencies in front of a set's picture tube). Broadcasters generally disliked this system, however, because shades of digital TV! it couldn't be picked up by existing TV sets.
By 1952, RCA Corp., the owner of NBC, had perfected a color system compatible with black-and-white TV, and it continued a campaign to dislodge CBS's system as the government-certified standard. According to broadcast historian Edwin H. Reitan Jr., the two networks aired a handful of color shows in 1953, including the opera "Carmen" and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," both on NBC.
By December of that year, heeding the complaints of broadcasters, the FCC switched gears, accepting the RCA system as the industry standard. It retains that status to this day.
Yet, while TV captivated a newly suburbanized America in the 1950s, color TV did not.
Historians point out that the problems were largely the same as those that surround digital TV today. "The basic problem was the lack of both programs and receivers and the question of which should be developed first," wrote Andrew F. Inglis in his 1990 book "Behind the Tube."
Eager to promote color TV as a new profit generator, RCA brought out the first consumer color set, the CT-100, in 1954. It had a 15-inch-wide screen and cost $1,000 a huge price at the time, especially given that NBC was the only network offering semi-regular shows in color, according to Reitan.
The other networks demurred. CBS, lacking any desire to help its competitor, cut back on its color programming. The third network, ABC, couldn't afford to produce programs in color at a time when its affiliates were struggling to keep black-and-white transmissions going.
A year after the CT-100's introduction, RCA had sold all of 5,000 sets.
But as color cameras improved and more programs became available, color began slowly to take hold.
NBC helped matters along in 1961 with the premiere of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color," a one-hour Sunday series that featured nature programs, cartoons and classics from Disney (historic parallel: Tonight's high-definition broadcast of "101 Dalmatians" on the "Wonderful World of Disney" on the Disney-owned ABC will be the first nationwide HDTV broadcast by a commercial network).
In 1962, ABC chipped in with colorcasts of "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons." By the fall of 1965, CBS had resumed regular color broadcasts, including "The Ed Sullivan Show."
(Second historic parallel: CBS, the pioneer of color TV, was a pioneer in HDTV as well. Back in the early 1980s, it introduced an analog system in which twice the number of image lines are transmitted compared with a standard picture today. The system "could be in operation by the end of the decade," said Video Review magazine.)
In 1966, a full dozen years after RCA marketed the first color TV, color sets finally passed black-and-white models in sales, with 5.8 million units sold.
A year later, 1969, almost one-third of all households had color TVs; by 1972, the figure stood at almost half, and by 1984 color sets had penetrated into just over 90 percent of American homes, according to the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association. (Old technologies never completely die: Americans also bought about 700,000 black-and-white TVs last year, CEMA says).
Will digital TVs spread even more slowly? One advantage that color had was compatibility. A color set picked up black-and-white transmissions just fine; color signals were picked up by the old TVs and displayed as black and white. Digital has a problem in that it's an entirely new and separate technology. Without costly converter boxes, old sets can't display digital signals.
But digital may have a financial leg up. Adjusting for inflation, the $1,000 cost of a color TV in 1954 is the equivalent of something over $6,000 in today's dollars, about what it will cost to buy a digital TV. Relatively, there are more families today wealthy enough to afford so large a purchase than there were in 1954.
What's more, manufacturing technologies have improved greatly since the 1950s, enabling prices to fall rapidly once mass production cranks up. For example, digital video disc (DVD) players, a successor to VCRs, came on the market for as much as $1,500 18 months ago. Today, they sell for about $400.
This assumes, of course, that high-definition and digital TV sets prove as thrilling to consumers as DVD players and other popular gadgets. That's no sure bet.
Jay Leno, whose show will be broadcast in HDTV next spring, doesn't think it will.
"The leap to HDTV is not as great," he says. "I don't think anyone will sit around an HDTV and go 'Oooh! Aaaah!' People just expect it now. We have technology that is so much better than people's ability to use it. It's like having sex with an aerobics instructor. You know you'll never be good enough."
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