knudsen (11/23/82)
The color problems Darrel Plank mentioned with the PC are, alas, not confined to IBM's product but are intrinsic in the NTSC color video encoding (the same one used over the air) and therefore affect all of us who can't afford RGB color monitors, and whose machines don't have the separate outputs for them even if we could. It is very disconcerting to have a beautiful clear display, until you go to write some big (!) orange letters over a deep blue background (what could be more natural) and find the orange smeared and ghosting and being strongest about a half inch to the right of where the letter pixels should be. Also, in high-resolution monochrome graphics, the sudden step functions in the luminance signal bleed into the chrominance bandpass (3.58 MHZ) and give you the beatiful (?) colors in between the B&W lines. Funny you should mention this; I was running an "artsy" program on my TRS-80 COCO last nite and, after noticing these extraneous colors, resolved to write a test program to determine what colors you got with 1, 2, 3 etc black spaces in between the white ones..... I have noticed both problems on my CoCo and on Ataris (supposedly the best of the color computers). Also I remember what Johnny Carson's checkered plaid suits used to do to the set -- beatiful Moire patterns that weren't "really" there. You don't even need a computer! I think these problems could be solved by borrowing Don Lancaster's suggestion to limit the luminance and chrominance bandwidths BEFORE they hit the TV/monitor circuits, where the sharp edges just trigger lots of ringing and cause all the problems. When my CoCo warranty runs out .... .... mike k