Color TV: A History
Me, I like black-and-white movies, and I can recall with embarrassing ease a time when color TV was a rarity reserved for the rich. The earliest color TV sets, which went on sale in 1954, cost $1,295 each, a bit more than ten thousand dollars in today’s money. My family, which didn’t have that kind of cash to throw around, waited to buy a color set until 1966, the year that all three networks (remember the three networks?) changed over to full-color prime-time broadcast schedules. Prior to that time, the world came to our living room in black and white, and even though commercial color TV had been introduced twelve years earlier, I knew it not. That’s why it’s natural for me to think of the not-so-distant past as a colorless realm inhabited by great men (and a few women) who now exist only in shades of gray.