Color television (American English) or colour television (British English) is a television transmission technology that also includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white television technology, which displays the image in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world transitioned from black-and-white to color broadcasting between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television standards was an important part of the history and technology of television.
Transmission of color images using mechanical scanners had been conceived as early as the 1880s.