[Adlershof]

Just had the leisure to check out this thread, and perhaps some collected notes could be of interest also months later:

Originally Posted by ppppenguin

PAL was sometimes called "Peace At Last" in the UK.

Another one, I don't know where it originated: "Pay for Additional Luxury".

SECAM is utterly different to NTSC except for the use of colour difference signals. It's also a horror story for anything byond simple cuts in the studio. Even a fade requires horrible processes that degrade the picture.

In 1977 a vision mixer had been introduced that avoided the separate chroma path with a process called Amplitude Modulated Chrominance, using an internal 5.75 MHz carrier. This was an invention of – Bosch. Seems that they at Thomson-CSF were not too happy about the best SECAM vision mixer (and other good SECAM gear as well) being Made in Germany.

But in practice more and more PAL gear came into use also at SECAM stations. Inavoidable result was at least a final PAL-SECAM conversion, and also cascades of SECAM-PAL-SECAM or even more steps were not uncommon. It is my impression that this did much more harm to the picture quality than the specific weaknesses of the SECAM system (which appear to be overemphasized thanks to clever PAL marketing, just as it is the case with NTSC).

There was no need for Sony to reverse engineer PAL. The PAL system was described in the Bruch/Telefunken patents. What Sony did was treat PAL as a sort of NTSC to navigate round the patents.

I was not aware of this aspect of PAL patents so far. Makes me wonder how Comecon manufacturers like Staßfurt and Tesla (these two definitely made TV sets with PAL decoders) handled it.

Originally Posted by Colly0410

& probably 819 lines then convert to 625 lines, both with positive modulation & AM sound..

And thus even after going to 625 lines being incompatible to the rest of the world.

"SECAM-capable" TV sets were common in West Germany, but I understand that this was just good for East German TV (and French forces TV in Berlin) while only real, expensive multinorm sets (usually also being capable of NTSC-M, put on air in Germany by AFN) could receive the crazy French "L" system.

This led to a rather widespread misbelief that "French SECAM" is different from "East Bloc SECAM". Of course it was the same SECAM III B, and I know a TV engineer who liked to provide evidence of this to surprised layman by tuning into an analogue satellite signal from France and hooking an old Staßfurt set to the modulator output of the receiver.

Originally Posted by wa2ise

If the burst changed frequency line to line, it was SECAM. If the burst frequency was steady, and line to line phase was 180 degrees flip. it had to be NTSC, if it was (something like +45 and -45 IIRC), it was PAL.

Reminds me of a behaviour of German (West as well as East) TV sets with decoders for both PAL and SECAM: At times the PAL decoder opened also on a SECAM signal, resulting in a rainbow picture. A screen shot of this phenomenon produced a rumour of a PAL test being done with the Inselsberg transmitter. Really just a poor rumour, because there was nothing to test here at all: The transmitter would have simply swallowed the PAL burst.

Originally Posted by dtvmcdonald

The 50Hz I have seen has all been in 50Hz South American countries, Malaysia,
and England.

I was in Malaysia at the height of the CRT to flat screen "always on"
transition and the flicker difference between
CRT and LCD was amazing.

I know that I'm not the only one who now, when occasionally seing an old CRT TV (not 100 Hz technology), is wondering how we could have beared this flicker at all.

Of course, given the terrible 50HZ flicker problem, perhaps
European producers avoided white screens even more
than ours did

I would say no, they did not.

Originally Posted by ceebee23

BUT how would 525/60 PAL look

I.e. what is being transmit in Brazil. That's something I'm wondering about for a long time. And the same goes for the approach of Paraguay and Uruguay to modulate 625/50 video as if it were 525/60, i.e. with 4.2 MHz bandwith.