I was born in roughly the same year as the OP (1975) and we never had a black and white TV. Neither did anyone else where we lived. This was a non-affluent neighbourhood that nonetheless prized TV viewing highly.
I did have a black and white TV again for a week or so when I was 19. One of my flatmates had a habit of wandering the streets to find electronics people had thrown out, bringing them home and fixing them. The first one was a black and white TV. None of us had watched TV for about a year, so all 7 of us crowded around the 12 inch set and leaned forward with curiosity, like we were cargo cultists gathering to see at first hand this strange new mystery. The people all looked so small.
Oh, the wealthy have to pretend that they don’t watch a lot of TV, but the truth is they watch as much as anyone with a lesser income. They just don’t have the TV in the living room for fear the jackbooted thugs from Architectural Digest will kick the door in an photograph it.
I have a friend who repairs old TVs and tube radios, etc. He recently cleaned out a warehouse for a guy and a section of that warehouse had a bunch of old B&W console TVs that were still in the box…never turned on.
One of them is in good working order (apparently things deteriorate over the course of 40 years and even a brand new item needs some work) and he has a digital converter box hooked to it.
We were watching some RetroTV channel that’s broadcast over the air, and even though whatever we were watching was originally in color (some 70s ambulance drama), it seemed fitting to be watching it on this old B&W. The picture seems a lot better than most standard-def color TVs I’ve seen in recent years.
Parents got their first color TV in '74, I think. I bought a $49 nine inch B&W in '80 to replace the 12" used one I bought in about '75. Finally got my first 13" color set that was my grandma’s when she died in '84. I still have a functional 5" B&W portable I bought at a yard sale for $3.
Around 1967 if I remember right and that was the one my family had until I graduated in 1977. My own first color TV? I don’t really remember, I wasn’t much of a TV watcher in my late teens and 20s. I didn’t go to college until my 30s (after I’d married etc), so I worked a lot of hours and for entertainment had friends over or went dancing. I remember that I had a tiny little B&W set that I’d set up in the bathroom on Thursday nights in the 80s (Knot’s Landing dontcha know? :D) while I was taking a bubble bath.
I don’t remember really developing much of an interest in TV, other than a few favorite shows, until the late 90s. I must have had a color TV at some point during those years but it was an old crappy model.
My own first fancy “real” color TV my mom and sis got for me for Christmas in 2004 and I had it until I recently moved to Seattle when I got myself a flat screen.
I bought a small black and white for my first apartment, in 1982. When I got married in 1986, we retired that TV in favor of my wife’s existing color set.
We had a giant B&W console Magnavox until 1977. Star Trek, Charlie’s Angels, National Geographic, all in glorious black and white. When it died in '77 we had no TV until '79 until Dad picked up a color Trinitron on sale.
But Grandma, two blocks away, got a color set in 1973 and big events were time to go over to her house.
I had a little $125 portable B&W set in college and didn’t ditch it until I replaced it in 1987 with a little color one from Sears. Right now I have a dead man’s set, a largish color Panasonic circa 1993 that my dad’s old friend wanted to give away when he died. Thanks, Ray!
How do “new” movies shot in B&W like “Good Night and Good Luck” look like on HDTV sets?
I’m surprised someone hasn’t made a Retroizer device so older B/W shows look like we remember - my plasma TV shows B/W as pretty much true black and white, but a B/W TV would be more like dark bluish-gray/pale bluish gray. Don’t think I’ve ever seen actual black on a B/W TV unless the thing was off.
The dynamic range needs to be compressed, the focus could stand a bit of softening and a sprinkle of snow and ghosting to look like you were using an old antenna would help.
The last time that I watched a B/W TV with any regularity was 1976 when the family TV died and was temporarily replaced with a small set from Mom and Dad’s bedroom (You might be a redneck if you’re watching a small TV sitting on a large, broken TV…)
The replacement was a (for then) enormous 25" console RCA ColorTrak. How did we ever see things back then? Right now, I’m working at a PC with two 23" monitors, and my bedroom TV is 32" - the “main” TV in the house is 58" - more than four times the image area as that old behemoth from 1976.
When we got a color Magnavox TV around 1980, the old B&W Zenith went into my room. It was still working fine when I left for college in 1989. I have lots of memories watching the scrambled channel for free of pay-tV provider “ON-TV” late nights.
We had color TV in the house around the early 70’s. I still had a 13" B&W when I went to college in 1982. I finally replaced it in with a color one in 1985 or so.
I bought a 12" b&w Magnavox when I was preparing to go away to college in 1985. I still used it for a good five years after graduation, so… into the mid-90s?
Well, assuming your current sets are 16:9 (and if they aren’t just ignore the rest of this post) that 58 incher is indeed pretty big, but that 32" not so much. Since TV’s are measured by a diagonal, when you change the ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 it suddenly makes a 32" TV much smaller than it would’ve been before the change. Just eyeballing it, my dad’s 32" widescreen LCD seems about the equivalent of my 27" old school CRT.
