Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frank StantonFrank Stanton
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 755

Stanton:

Different sets.

Q:

Different sets.

Stanton:

Sure. Don't forget, at that time, a black and white RCA ten inch picture tube, I think the retail, the list price, was six hundred and fifty dollars. So you were talking about a sizeable investment at a time when six hundred and fifty dollars was -- what? The equivalent of probably sixty-five hundred dollars today. And this was a very difficult hurdle. The longer the Commission delayed its decision in authorizing our system, the less chance we had of making it happen, and of course that's exactly what took place.

Now, that doesn't address itself to the engineering philosophy of the two systems and so forth. At the time, I was persuaded that Peter's system produced better pictures than anything that any engineer had -- certainly better than anything that the RCA group had demonstrated. They always said in the future their pictures would get much better and --

Q:

They weren't working off the same color bar system?

Stanton:

Oh, no. Theirs was a complicated system. It was like putting a twenty-pound roast in a five-pound pan. They were crowding a lot of information into a very narrow part of the spectrum, which meant that you got a degraded picture. And we never thought that the picture could ever develop to the quality that we were demonstrating with Peter's system. But that whole part of history is gone, whether there were improvements that Peter would have had in his system as well as improvements that they talked about in their system. The medical, the surgical profession when they were demonstrating surgical procedures and so





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help