How big was the main viewer on the original USS Enterprise NCC-1701? An image here looks like about 65" diagonal.
Poking around on google, I wasn’t able to find any official information. However, I did find one site from someone who created their own bridge set. They used an 80 inch flat screen since anything larger would have been cost prohibitive and said that it seemed to be a bit small.
I took a look at pictures from the original series and compared that to blueprints that you can find online of the bridge, and figuring that the bridge set was about 30 feet across (the most common number I saw on google), I came up with roughly a 70 inch screen (diagonal), but that could be a bit off.
In a small town on the north side end Lake George, NY there is a town with a tourist attraction featuring much of the original set of Star Trek, and what was not obtained by them was meticulously measured and recreated from the original set parts which was bought by some rich dude or dudet. I took the tour a few years back. That screen is a green screen, just a blank panel, that the image was added later, so its size limit was not a tech issue.
I pulled out my Star Trek technical manual and looked at the floor plan for the bridge. As far as I can tell based on the scale provided, the view screen looks to be about 2.5 meters across.
Even as a kid, watching the show for the first time, I was thinking this. “Geez, it’s just a green rectangle, why didn’t they make it bigger? I mean, it’s the future, wouldn’t they have wall-sized screens?”
I’m a bit surprised they were using green that early on. It obviously wasn’t rear projection, but I thought they still uses blue back then for film compositing. Or just has it be black for easy matting, since the camera angle was always the same (I believe).
I can think of at least two exceptions to this: At the end of “The Doomsday Machine,” Kirk and Spock are followed as they walk in front of the screen. The image on it is obviously a large still photo of outer space, since none of the stars are moving. In “Spock’s Brain,” Kirk paces in front of the screen during the search, and the stars are actually moving. This was before the episodes were remastered 15–20 years ago, and it must have added considerably to the special effects budget.
I was using the term green screen generically, I don’t remember the actual color. Now that I think of it one of the screens used was a curtain, on one episode you can see it moving with the air movement.
Part of Star Trek’s 5 year mission was to sell color TV’s and, just a WAG here, that may have played a role in viewer size. This part of their mission is also why they wore colorful shirts, and also the original set was very colorful in general.
The goal was not to sell bigger screen TV’s but for people to upgrade from b&w to color, and to think home TV viewing, not big screen movies. I’m not sure that played a part in it, but the concept of the TV series may have influenced the set.
Only a few sips into my first cuppa joe, so…
In the image on the page linked in the OP, Walter Koenig is standing next to the screen. Walter Koenig is 5’ 6" tall. In the picture, he’s slumping a bit. I think if he were standing straight the top of his head would be about even with the top of the screen. I don’t have a small measuring device, so I can’t measure the distance from the floor (which can be seen) to the bottom and to the top of the viewer. Just eyeballing it, and assuming the set designers would use ‘easy’ units (e.g., four feet instead of three feet, nine and seven-eighths inches) it looks like the screen is about 48 inches tall. It looks about the same aspect ratio as our 65" TV, which is about 36" tall. Laying a business card over the screen in the image at a 45º angle from the top-left corner to the bottom of the screen, and assuming 48" height, I’m guessing the width is six feet.
So… 86.5 inches diagonal?
As I suspected, that still is from “Spock’s Brain.” They must have been using some form of back projection to get that effect where the actors could stand and move in front of the screen while the images changed. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall if any other third season episodes used it.
as with all things Star Trek, they weren’t even consistent with the viewer. Note that in the first episodes the viewscreen had rounded corners, like a then-modern TV. It looked as stupid as Kirk’s chair video monitor. Glad they went with the upgrade.
Then of course there’s the “is it a window” because Kirk looks in Requiem For Methuselah as if it were.
Huh! I never noticed that (the rounded viewscreens) before. And this was after Matt Jeffries redesigned the Bridge after the first pilot.
Interesting.
Also a female crewmember. (Item 6)
The screen in that is around 640x370 pixels, and the woman’s height around 550.
I just thought–I did those measurements from a screencap of the animated gif, so aren’t the exact gif pixel dimensions. But proportions will be the same.