“Almost black-and-white” is the closest I can describe it. You see it a lot in commercials these days. The color is there but at a very low saturation level. Think of the grayest overcast day you can remember and it’s like that. It’s very commonly mixed with having the significant object in the scene at normal color to stand out sharply.
My camera has a mode called ‘Sepia’ (http://www.photo.net/photo/sepia/index)
that it?
I’d call it desaturation. You can see the same effect by turning down the “color” slider on your TV.
‘Black and white’ is really shades of grey. ‘Sepia’ is the same thing only in shades of that brownish colour. (See the Kansas scenes in a proper print of The Wizard of Oz.) As pointed out above, that faded look is desaturation.
A few old movies used that colour-on-B&W effect. IIRC, they sometimes shot on B&W stock, hand-painted over the colour item, and spliced copies of the coloured section into B&W prints for distribution.
And the alleged Zyada above is really rjk, who didn’t check before posting.