Color Riddle

In New York last Week, early morning televiewers who happened to tune in NBC-TV were surprised to find, instead of the usual test pattern, a strange series of vertical bands. Soon these changed to still pictures of London's Houses of Parliament and a landscape, then to a live model who moved little more than her eyelashes. The continuous tone signal accompanying the pictures was finally broken by an announcer. Casually, he explained that the testing period was being devoted to "experiment with and development of the compatible, all-electronic RCA color television system."

The experiment was a further bit of proof that RCA's "dot sequential" color system can be reproduced on ordinary sets in better-than-usual black & white. It was also further evidence that RCA had no intentions of giving up the color fight.

Last fall the Federal Communications Commission had picked the CBS "field sequential" system (which cannot be received on black & white sets without a special converter) over RCA's compatible system (TIME, Dec. 4). An appeal had been carried by RCA right up to the Supreme Court. RCA's new demonstration, even before the court handed down its decision, touched off a wave of nervous rumors in the jittery TV industry.

One industry rumor was that RCA had developed a new-type color camera, or maybe it was a new tube. RCA executives kept mum, would only explain vaguely that, because of the pending court decision, "we just don't want to be active publicly at this time."

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