Monochrome monitors on The Andrew Marr Show.
Richardcoulter
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At about 0.34:18 there is a historical 'Nationwide' piece where Callaghan is talking about the Lib Lab pact of 1977.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05t3j3f/the-andrew-marr-show-26042015
I was surprised to see that, even though colour television had been around for ten years, the monitors that they were talking to in the studio were black & white!
Also, when the speaker on the monitor was talking and it went to full screen, it was in colour!?
Was it normal for the BBC to still be using monochrome monitors in studios at that time?
This seems very odd, especially considering that the feed was obviously in colour.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05t3j3f/the-andrew-marr-show-26042015
I was surprised to see that, even though colour television had been around for ten years, the monitors that they were talking to in the studio were black & white!
Also, when the speaker on the monitor was talking and it went to full screen, it was in colour!?
Was it normal for the BBC to still be using monochrome monitors in studios at that time?
This seems very odd, especially considering that the feed was obviously in colour.
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The clip shows a bank of monitors, colour monitors in those days were very expensive, heavy and not very bright. Using B&W monitors for a cheap show like Nationwide would have been a cost effective solution.
yeah. Good quality monitors needed best shadowmask tubes to show the full picture resolution ........
You try colour balancing an onscreen crt to get it looking anything like right ?
TV phosphors were not a good match for tubed cameras........ And unless you used a grade 1 also changed colour balance depending in content....
And a grade 1 monitor was well over £1000 where the professional monochrome so were about £150 .....
And a domestic TV set needed an isolation transformer as it had live chassis.
And then there were strobing due to phosphor having differential decay...
A flat panel display showing a field/ Frame at a time is a lot easier to work with and it has a much better phosphor match to the solid state sensors ..
They also have dead chassis ..
So in those days it was not easy ....
All true, in fact there was so much UV from the RBM colour monitors that the only way to get them to look OK on an EMI 2001 was to attach a sheet of light yellow gel in front of them causing refection and brightness problems. B&W monitors also had this problem but at least they were brighter. There was a coloured spray you could use but if someone cleaned the screen it rubbed off.
Purves also mentioned 'if you're lucky enough to be watching us in colour', which reminds us that even by the mid-70s colour was nowhere near universal.
All cue monitors in galleries were B&W, only the Preview and Transmission monitors were colour. This was partly due to cost and partly due to the problems of accurately matching a number of colour monitors whose phosphors changed slightly with age and batch number. Modern studios often use a single large screen colour cue monitor fed via a split screen unit.
And even mono monitors were batched for the same colour temperature ..... And in the late 1980s there were great problems getting reliable mono tubes as some phosphors were determined to be cancer inducing ....
Yes, even some facilites I built around 1989/90 still used b/w monitors in the gallery
for all but Preview and PGM (Tx)
These days (as Anthony said) large flat screen monitors are used, fed by multiviewers.
The problem now is that both the screen and the multiviewer can introduce a significant delay, so much so that in effect the director is not cutting live !
I remember about ten years ago, re equipping a news studio, and using an early LCD monitor for the floor monitor. The presenters rejected it, and it's not hard to understand why, they are very used to seeing themselves inverted (unlike a mirror) but not with a 200 ms delay. We had to replace with a CRT monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yWXBIooTP4
Here's that very piece: (audio sync issues)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ3wYiNZJIQ
Which was the main reason for not using colour monitors; technical or financial reasons?
I'd have to say technical reasons, as BBC funding was probably better in real terms then than it is today (and they had less services to fund). I can remember the TV licence going up every year and then, IIRC, the Thatcher Government limited increases to inflation only.
When did colour monitors finally replace their monochrome counterparts? Would it be when commercial LED monitors became available (presumably much sooner than to the general public)?
The decisions almost always boil down to financial ones, always did.
Colour monitors for all applications probably came in from the early 90s.
http://www.tvstudiohistory.co.uk/old%20bbc%20studios.htm
The point was that you could do most of the checks on waveform monitors (scopes) and keep an eye on the important bits of the transmission chain (i.e. is it still working) without needing to look at the colour information.
You selected the final point in the chain or the off air receiver to the colour monitor to alert you to any issues.
It's still common today to come across HD cameras with B&W monocular viewfinders!
Were domestic televisions used in the early days of broadcasting, or have specialist monitors always been available?
How did Nationwide work? Were all those monitors featured linked to all the regional feeds ie they were all "Nationwide" hence the name of the programme? If so, did the Nations participate, or did Scotland etc have their own programmes instead of Nationwide?
Cheers.
The Sony 9-90UB seemed to be used quite a bit. It was small, cheap, dual standard and easily modified for video input.
(Sad that I am still able to remember the full model number!)
http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=72693
It shows some pictures of this model.
Nationwide couldn't display all the regions because there weren't enough lines coming into London; Manchester would switch Scotland, Northern Ireland, Leeds and Newcastle ; Bristol would switch Cardiff and Plymouth; Birmingham themselves and Norwich.The first 20 minutes of Nationwide were regional slots and then the network programme.
Even sader, I still have a working one !!
It's pretty clear that b/w examples of such monitors would be much cheaper than colour ones.
Leeds was fed directly to Manchester but Glasgow, Newcastle and Belfast came down the same circuit from Carlisle where there was a sound and vision switch remotely operated by Manchester Switching Centre. It could get pretty hairy feeding the right source to Lime Grove ( where the Nationwide studio was) during the busy opening part of the programme.
On some occasions Manchester fed the vision from the Bangor studio in North Wales to London. Interestingly the sound went via Cardiff!!
More often we used a North Wales Nationwide backing behind the contributor in Studio N Manchester and pretended to be Welsh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5aZI3iBL5o
This is the rehearsal/line up recorded in BBC Manchester (the old Studio N at Piccadilly), with them cutting up Leeds as an outside source.
I suspect on other occasions if Manchester didn't have a contribution into Nationwide Manchester Comms would have routed Leeds directly rather than through Studio N's gallery.
I'd heard of one of the switching centres sending sound and vision from different places down to Lime Grove for a laugh during rehearsal/line up time, but I hadn't realised the sound a vision from Bangor took different routes - did it arrive in London in sync?