MovieChat Forums > Life on Mars (2006) Discussion > High-quality color TV in 1973 makes no s...

High-quality color TV in 1973 makes no sense

posted a year ago by avortac4 (3642)
2 replies | jump to latest

Color televisions have existed for a long time, I know.

However, even basic, small-screen ones were very expensive, it didn't become more popular than grayscale TVs until 1976 in UK.

To get a good quality picture, a good transmission and good display on a color TV back in the day, you'd have to sometimes tinker quite a bit even in the eighties, and even then, the quality wasn't even CLOSE to what this show displays.

Look at it, an ENORMOUS color TV in a supposedly 'sleazy and cheap' 1973 apartment, with IMPECCABLE quality, the kind you couldn't EVER see even in the 1980s! That kind of quality basically didn't exist until DVDs came along, unless your TV was not only exceptional in quality and you had optimized it perfectly and the transmission was an exceptionally high quality, as well as the antenna receiving it (there was no 'cable', as far as I know - even when the signal came from the wall socket, there was an antenna on the roof).

It's ridiculous what these modern movie- and showmakers think TV quality in the 1970s and 1980s was like - you see this same mistake in the movie 'X-Men: Days of the Future Past' - the VHS signal and picture quality in that movie's supposed '1980s' is so good it's almost literally out of this world.

What the heck, why can't people remember or research what the TV quality was REALLY like in 1980s and 1970s?

A cheap TV would have been much smaller and clunkier. A TV that size, quality and 'unclunkiness' (for the lack of better word) would've cost a FORTUNE, so even if it's not technically anachronistic (which it might be), it just doesn't fit the REST of the apartment that was shown to be cheap and tacky indeed.

Most people that had a TV, had a greyscale one anyway back in 1973, color TVs were basically a rarity back in the day. A rarity TV in a cheap apartment..??

Also, I can't stress enough just how impossible it would've been to get THAT kind of flawless, interference-less picture quality with a friggin' RF plug they had available in 1973! Think about it - I have a direct connection to an old video game system, but because it's RF, the signal is very 'noisy' (disturbingly so), and this is a direct connection to a system, not a transmission that has been traveling through the air and received by an antenna on the roof and then routed through a plug in the wall!

How the F are you going to get a perfectly clear, completely interference-free picture signal to a color TV in 1973 without the colors even bleeding, and the resolution looking much higher than what was actually available back in the day (I don't even want to go into this whole resolution stuff anyway)?

I would LOVE to know the method... also, why is the apartment shown to be so cheap-looking in all possible ways, but the TV so extremely expensive?

Also, how does someone living in 2006 just instinctively know how to turn on a 1973 TV and change channels? It's a very different thing to operate than a computer or 'mobile phone' from 2006 era!

At least fumble a BIT, a little bit! Just look at the thing and try to figure it out before trying out how to turn it on and such.

There's no hope.. nothing makes sense.

[–] [deleted] a year ago

You're referring to Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TVs there, and I still had one in my room by the time this series aired. So maybe they didn't have old ones to hand, or they were all broken or too expensive to obtain for the show, but while I personally remember what colour TVs were like back then (born in 1972), maybe they didn't care too much about that aspect of recreating the early 70s?

I've known many younger people who still know what rotary phones, VHS and audio cassettes, actual big black floppy disks and record players are, so I would give people more credit in that regard.

Then again, I fell in love with DVDs because they were designed for and looked brilliant on CRT TVs, especially when in SCART RGB mode! I even ditched my last VHS recorder in 2004 as a result! But now DVDs look too soft because of the wanton abandonment of CRT and the vast-scale adoption of HD LCD, which, while good in its own way, I lamented because now I had to buy my favourite movies all over again on Blu-ray to make them look as good on the new screens as DVD did on CRT!

[–] liscarkat (16968) a year ago

My family wasn't rich, by any means, but we had a color television with a 25-inch screen in 1966. We lived in a suburb about thirty miles from the transmission towers on Mt. Wilson, north of Los Angeles, and we had an antenna on the roof. The color picture was not like 21st century high-definition, but it was steady and clear. Before we got the color set, the same was true for our black-and-white tv.