Why in the world did Commodore choose to put a monochrome composite video output jack onto the A500/A2000?
They already had years of experience adding colour video output to their 8-bit line of computers (VIC-20, C64, TED, etc.)
The Amiga 1000 that came beforehand had composite colour output. The later A600 and A1200 had colour composite output.
But they chose greyscale / black & white video output for the A500 / A2000.
The Amiga was marketed as a multimedia machine - colour was important to its image. Why take this step backward?
Monochrome composite output is almost useless. I never used it. Did anyone really use this feature, other than for quickly testing your machine on a TV when a monitor wasn't available, or as a stopgap measure until you got afford a real monitor or an A520 RF modulator?
It seems like such a lost opportunity, too - as having a COLOUR video composite output would have been quite handy for desktop video people who wanted a secondary display, for hooking the Amiga up to a larger TV or video projector for presentations to groups, for recording the Amiga's colour video output to video tape, etc. etc. It would also have helped sell the Amiga to those on a budget who wanted it only for gaming - they could have bought an A500 and hooked it up to a TV instead of buying a monitor.
But instead someone made the decision that it would be monochrome. WHY?!
It just doesn't make a lot of sense, in retrospect. There are only two reasons that I can think of that would explain why Commodore did it:
1. It saved a few cents of production cost per machine,
2. or initially there was no composite output planned for the A500/2000, and some innovative engineer figured out that it would be simple to add a monochrome (luma) output without adding much cost to the design.
