Ah, memories! I was a teenager in Denmark in the seventies. We easily picked up TV from both of the two Germanies. The channels from the west were sleek and mod

Ah, memories! I was a teenager in Denmark in the seventies. We easily picked up TV from both of the two Germanies. The channels from the west were sleek and modern in full color, while those from the DDR were in lifesapping greyscale ("black and white", as some like to call it). I knew this was an artifact from the SECAM -> PAL conversion, but it still managed perfectly well to reinforce our hazy notions about the Eastern Bloc as a strange, grainy, not-quite-real kind of place - a slightly subconscious impression many of my age will no doubt recognize. And then there were the occasional American clips on the evening news, and sometimes even whole shows that noone had bothered to give a quality conversion: Poor resolution and loud, garish, oversaturated colors. This I also knew to be a conversion artifact, but just like the eastern greyscale, it tended to reinforce certain preconceived notions. Perception is an interesting thing to hack.