Confirmation! CBS Buys Marconi Color Cameras…October 31, 1966

It was always my opinion that CBS only kept the Norelco PC60s at Studio 50 (The Ed Sullivan Theater), for eighteen months or so. Now that is confirmed with this article that appeared on my sixteenth birthday in Broadcasting Magazine.

In another Halloween quirk, it was October 31, 1965 when the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ went color in Studio 50 with the Norelcos. The show had actually been broadcast in color the prior three weeks, but those shows came from Television City while the New York studio was being finished.

As stated in the article, the five Mark VIIs would arrive in the summer and that makes eighteen months. As we’ve learned, Studio 50 had big magnetic field problems caused by the subway generators just behind the backstage wall. In field tests of a prototype Mark VII, that was not much of a problem but it was for the Norelcos. As Paul Harvey would say, “Now we know…the rest of the story”.

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