Color vs. black/white

I got into an interesting discussion with Russell yesterday about the visual perception of color vs. black & white. We were talking about old photos and he said that when he was a kid he thought that photos were shot in color but older ones were SO old that they had faded to black and white. I told him about my friend Tim who thought that everyone saw in black & white until 1939 when the makers of 'The Wizard of Oz' INVENTED color and put it in the movie and from then on everyone could see in color! I was mentioning how it seems like a black & white picture just looks older. I was looking up tornado info a couple of days ago and found black & white photos of the Topeka tornado of 1966 and they looked like photos from the Tri-State tornado of 1925 or even older ones, but then I found a color video of the same storm happening and it looked like it was current if not only happening a few years ago! We also discussed film vs. live action video. Recently I've been watching these DVD's with the live action broadcasts of the Super Bowls and some of these are from the 70's but for some reason the live broadcast looks clearer and sharper, and looks as if it could have been just a few days ago, but NFL films movies of the very same game are grainy and look old. We guessed that maybe it was the type of camera used because television broadcasts, especially of the Super Bowl, would have been using the latest camera technology to send the game to the TV network and into living rooms around the world and I noticed it was usually stationary in the booth above the 50 yard line with later games having a few other stationary cameras in the end zone and on the sidelines. While the same game is captured in a whole bunch of other angles for the NFL films show, but the camera may not have been as high quality. All of this is visual perception and you have to wonder if everyone sees it the same way? I was watching Super Bowl X the other week and apart from the quality of the video used, it looks exactly like it did when I'd last seen it at Danielle's first birthday party back on January 18, 1976 and of course that was viewing it through the TV technology of the time, i.e. the television brand and type we had at home, which back then was pure analog and going through an antennae and not a cable box.