Big Pic	November 2002:  Primary Colors My cousin Cecil Gibson fell asleep in a chair at a family reunion in July 1969.  I've shown that snapshot in two different ways to illustrate a little-known fact about the history of color television.
	Color TV today transmits three primary-color images at once:  red, green, and blue.  As shown on the left half of this composite, they're combined to form what we perceive as a full-color picture. But when color TV was being invented, it was thought that perhaps bandwidth could be conserved by transmitting only two images instead of three.  There was a precedent:  early Technicolor movies in the 1920s used only two strips of film instead of three. The colors proposed were orange and cyan, as shown on the right half of this composite.  The orange includes red and half of the green; the cyan includes blue and the rest of the green.  When these two hues are combined, the result is a quasi-color picture. You can look at such pictures in isolation and perceive them as being "in color."  But they lack true saturated reds and blues.  Cecil's patriotic ribbon is now orange, white, and bluish gray, and the browns in the picture have turned to greenish gray.  It's sort of like looking through green-tinted sunglasses. It’s reminiscent of that primitive Technicolor, which looked like the images below from the opening scene of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 Biblical epic The King of Kings.  I call it a Miami Dolphins palette, all oranges and aquas. Had television's developers not been able to squeeze three primary colors into the available bandwidth, this is the sort of picture we might still be watching today.