It’s not film, but the Apple II (1971) used a monochromatic display or something for technical reasons. I’m trying to find the quote but unfortunately I can’t so this is from memory. It was something like going with black and white allowed them a better frame rate/resolution over color (and for cheaper).
It’s possible similar tradeoffs existed for monochromatic film into the '90s.
The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.
But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…
Maybe I’m getting it confused with a different apple computer then besides the apple 2. I definitely have seen a clip talking about this. Maybe the original iMac or something.
It’s not film, but the Apple II (1971) used a monochromatic display or something for technical reasons. I’m trying to find the quote but unfortunately I can’t so this is from memory. It was something like going with black and white allowed them a better frame rate/resolution over color (and for cheaper).
It’s possible similar tradeoffs existed for monochromatic film into the '90s.
The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.
But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…
Maybe I’m getting it confused with a different apple computer then besides the apple 2. I definitely have seen a clip talking about this. Maybe the original iMac or something.