Television: Chasing the Rainbow

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Appliance dealers run the range from the hardest sort of sell (southern California in particular) to the attitude expressed by a Manhattan salesman: "I wouldn't sell a color set to my worst enemy. They're just too much trouble for what they cost and what they deliver."

Present color service contracts cost a discouraging $99.50 for the first year, $119 for the second. (Either annual outlay will buy a portable black-and-white set.) Color set owners must acclimate themselves to times when faces suddenly go green or saffron, figures bloom with fluorescence, and backgrounds become crimes against nature or interior decoration. With amazing docility, most color set owners accept these hazards uncomplainingly. Some even boast of learning how to tune their sets as a real accomplishment ; color tuning was an intricate, five-dial operation on RCA's earlier sets, is now somewhat simplified as a three-dial maneuver. Said one Connecticut set owner: "After a while you get used to it."

Noisy Stampede. If color sets could instantly be made much cheaper (they cannot be until genuine mass production is warranted), the public would doubtless snap them up without waiting for more color programs. If substantially more color shows were beamed at home screens (only NBC plans to do so this year), many more buyers would probably surrender to the present high prices. But advertisers will not invest up to 20% more money for color production until they can count on a bigger audience.

The industry dreams aloud of a breakthrough when 1,000,000 color sets will be in use. When that great day comes, the industry believes that black-and-white TV will gradually be trampled into oblivion by the noisy stampede of setmakers, networks, advertisers and public toward the elusive rainbow.