SNES displaying in black & white???

[NES_Rules]

A SNES that I'm selling is only displaying in B&W.  I tried using the RF switch and the A/V cables, but neither displayed in color.  And I have cleaned the games.
Anyone know of a solution? 

[Ghost Soldier]

Try unhooking everything from the back of the tv except the snes.  Also try different channel select or turn the channel on the tv from 3 to 4 and back to the setting on the snes.  Hopefully it's just an interferance problem

[NES_Rules]

Thanks for the ideas, but none of them worked. 

[The Metamorphosing Leon]

Get a color TV?

[Cobra]

Could you be using a NTSC SNES on a PAL TV?

[bum-man]

I assume other things show up on this TV in color, if not there are usually ways to adjust color settings on the TV that would make it appear in B/W.

[NES_Rules]

The TV is definitely in color. Just because I got it out of the trash doesn't mean it doesn't work.  I can switch the cable from the B&W TV to a working one and it displays perfectly. 

And it is a NTSC SNES on a NTSC TV. 

Over at DP, they said it's something with the chips inside the machine.  But they use some big fancy words and most of it, I can't understand   So, I think this SNES is just junk. 

[The Metamorphosing Leon]

Damn DP has to know everything.

[Hydrobond]

Did you try the SNES on a different TV to see if it is the TV or the SNES that is screwing up?  It sounds like you did, but it wasn't clear if that's what actually happened.

Back when everything was switching over to color TV from B&W some very smart guy figured out a way for the color information to be broadcast over the old black and while signal.  This allowed people with only B&W TVs to keep their sets and still watch the new color programming.  There is a chip inside the SNES and either a chip or analog circuit inside the TV which encodes and decodes this signal.  Either one could screw up, but it sounds like the SNES is at fault because the TV is in color on other channels, and also because you tried the RF converter with the SNES. 


More info: 

For backward compatibility with black and white television, NTSC uses a luminance-chrominance encoding system invented in 1938 by Georges Valensi. Luminance (derived mathematically from the composite color signal) takes the place of the original monochrome signal. Chrominance carries color information. This allows black and white receivers to display NTSC signals simply by ignoring the chrominance. In NTSC, chrominance is encoded using two 3.579545 MHz signals that are 90 degrees out of phase, known as I (in-phase) and Q (quadrature) QAM. Mathematically, the combination of two sine waves 90 degrees out of phase with each other, with varying respective amplitudes, can be viewed as a single sine wave with varying phase relative to a reference, and varying amplitude. In essence, the phase represents the instantaneous color hue captured by a TV camera and the amplitude represents the color saturation.

Have you tried cleaning the connection on the back of the SNES that leads to the TV?

[NES_Rules]

Thanks to Hydrobond, I figured it out.  The SNES is perfectly fine, it just seems that Apex TVs don't like this SNES. I tried the system on 4 different TVs.  1 Sylvania, 1 Fisher and 2 Apex.  It displayed fine on the Fisher and Sylvania, but both the Apexes displayed B&W. 

[Hydrobond]

That is odd.  Sounds like Apex doesn't like conforming to standards...