[opendtv] Re: France bids farewell to SECAM
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 16:18:00 -0600
Olivier Houot wrote:
> In France, the "invented here" syndrom certainly played a role,
> even though it was just a variation on NTSC (but then you could
> say part of NTSC also used the french patents of Georges
> Valensi), and the color CRT was really an american thing.
In Italy, ca. 1970 (seems way to recent for this!), they were talking about
SECAM and PAL together, like PAL for VHF and SECAM for UHF. Based purely on
politics. The lefties were pushing for a SECAM presence in the TV standard.
> Isn't it true that many modern NTSC sets still include an
> automatic skin tone correction ?
Not that I've seen, since the 1970s. The RCA set I bought in 1985 did not have
such a control. And I didn't like those controls anyway, because they seemed to
unsaturated the colors, even if they did help the skin tones. Those controls
disappeared just like the automatic fine tuning in FM radio receivers, to
compensate for drift.
> He said that by playing with the settings, he could get a nice
> picture from Radio-Canada, but when turning to american
> broadcasts (all by air) from ABC, NBC, CBS, chromatic accuracy
> was degraded, and it was not possible to compensate with the
> settings in a completely satisfying way. Also, it was different
> from channel to channel. So, i have my doubts that the problem
> was completely solved by switching to semiconductors.
Could be that Canadian broadcasts were more consistent. I didn't notice that
problem as much as I disliked the fact that with analogue OTA TV, you could
only count on a few channels being really good. The rest either had some ghost,
or some snow, or something or other that made them less than "perfect." Not to
mention, the resolution on all of them was awful.
The popular wisdom was that PAL and SECAM were also better than NTSC because
the pictures were sharper. But in fact, that was only a matter of channel width
- 8 MHz vs 6 MHz. Wasn't the original French 819 line format transmitted on 12
MHz channels?
Bert
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