If I went back in time carrying a 50 inch plasma TV, could I watch 1950s TV on it?
Yep.
Well, you could watch 50’s TV on it now (thanks TV Land), but if you took it back in time, you’d have a few stumbling blocks. Your main concern would be your input source. If your plasma set has an analog TV antenna and tuner, I don’t see why not. If it’s strickly digital, you’re SOL.
Assuming your TV has a standard NTSC (analog) tuner and you can get even a small indoor antenna, you’ll receieve glorious black and white channels. The picture and audio will likely be terrible, but that’s because of the relatively primitive technology of that era, not any basic incompatability.
You may some difficulty with the polarized plug and you will need an adapter for the antenna to convert it to 75ohm coax, but otherwise it should work just fine for picking up OTA VHF.
One of the reasons current NTSC is so crappy is that it was designed to maintain backward compatibility all the way back to the 50s.
Depends. For instance, if you go back to 1848, then no, you will not.
OP lives in London, so they will need a TV with a PAL tuner if they want to watch the BBC.
I’m curious if the display would be a well-proportioned 4:3 rectangle. Television CRT displays in the early 1950s were either round or a very rounded rectangle that is close to 1:1. I would imagine that if broadcasts of the era were 4:3 NTSC, either a good portion of the transmitted image was cut off, “squished” on the tube, or the transmitted image was distorted so it would look somewhat normal on the oscilloscope-like CRTs of the era.
Correct me if I am wrong but the system back then was 405 line, subsequently changed to 625 line, so the transmissions may be a complete mess if viewable at all.
I wish people would stop treating the past as if it were one time, unchanging like a museum exhibit.
Television sets made huge strides in the 1950s. They were already made with fairly large and viewable picture tubes by the beginning of the decade, as the 1950 Philco set shows. Some people may still have had early round or 1 to 1 screens, sure, but the 4 to 3 aspect ratio was well served by the beginning of the decade and would have been the norm by 1959. The problem was more in the production abilities of those making cathode-ray tubes and not in the signal being sent out.
The picture received wouldn’t necessarily have been b&w either. NBC’s first broadcast in NTSC compatible color, the same system used today, was on August 30, 1953, (Kukla, Fran and Ollie) though I’m not sure who received since the first color sets weren’t being sold until 1954. Anyway, a modern set would display the signal properly.
Would the picture quality be all that wonderful? Some plasmas don’t display the low resolution signal over-the-air signal all that well, I’ve read, and you might be disappointed in the result.
You could be right. A quick check of the Wikipedia page confirms that PAL refers only to the color - sorry, colour - encoding system, which they would not have been using in the 1950s. The BBC would indeed have been using 405-line standard back then. I think the OP is screwed.
Maybe he lives in London, MN?
In the UK, at least. Perhaps France, too, with its 819 linesystem. In North America, they’d be good to go.