1963 ad for wealthy people
 

In 1963 and 64 there were experimental color television broadcasts in São Paulo, Brazil. All color sets were imported. This ad, was published on december 1963 in one issue of the magazine "Intervalo" ( sort of a Brazilian version of "TV Guide" ), and is targeted at wealthy people who could travel to New York and buy there an expensive color TV. The shop was specalized on selling goods to Brazilian tourists.

It all ended on the following year, and Brazil would only get color TV in 1972.

The TV in the ad appears to be my metal cabinet Zenith roundy.

Can't read most of the ad. Did Brazil use NTSC for those experiments or was it PAL or some sort of CCIR with NTSC chroma hybrid?

In 1963 it was the same NTSC as in the US.

Interesting. So they could just buy, import and use as is a stock US color set....I wonder if any made it there and still survive? It would be an interesting thing to add to your collection if you find one.

I have seen one or two with other collectors... they are very, very, difficult to find.

During the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, an RCA authorized exporter in Manhattan gave out customized Hammond world's fair maps with its advertizing and location shown. Hammond map company made customized versions of its map for multiple different advertisers.

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Zenith also printed a custom brochure including a map of the fair and the location of their Manhattan showroom, although they were not pushing sales or exports at that location.

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https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...e849a2e4_b.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...df44dbf7_o.jpg

Imagine buying a set in NYC for $600-800 USD, then how much would it cost to ship to Brazil at that time? All for a set that could only be used for b/w! They'd have been much better off buying a 27" b/w made in Brazil, but at least they had bragging rights!

Awfully ironic. A Brazilian who brought one home from the USA would still be watching black-and-white TV, because Brazil adopted the incompatible PAL system.

Brazil adopted PAL-M, the 525 line version of PAL. The color decoder should be relatively simple to convert to a simple PAL decoder.

The original post explained there were experimental NTSC transmissions in 63-64...so someone importing such a set probably got to watch a few hours of test pattern and maybe some kind of programming before letting it sit dormant a few years, then contemplating PAL conversion.

"Bonanza" was one of the few things they broadcast in color, and some musicals, If I remember correctly.

I wonder if P.A.L. M - N.T.S.C. convertors where avaible later on?

That would be interesting, but I doubt it. There would be too small a market. Plus, the country would like to promote production and purchase of new receivers from domestic manufacturers.

In the 80's they were, because at the beginning of the VCR era there were no local made VCRs, they were all NTSC, all imported, so we had to rely on converters ( "transcoders" as they were called ) to use NTSC VCRs on our PAL-M TVs. I still have the one we used in the 80's at home. Think it still works.

OK, but that's the opposite direction of conversion from the original question (NTSC to PAL, not PAL to NTSC).

Wouldn't such a converter need to be bidirectional for a VCR so it can both record and play back?

Oops - you are right, of course. I got stuck thinking of pre-recorded material.

I wonder if any of those wealthy people kept the color tv later on and try to get a decoder for it.
I have an N.T.S.C. - P.A.L. M + N converter and it's works fine on my nickanme (trhough 'Telecolor' 3007 is B/G, D/K). I've tryed image only, because for the ouput of the LaserDisc player I used the R.C.A. audio output.
Anyway, why did Brazil choose such different colour tv standard?

The government decided that the NTSC system was flawed and under guidance of German scientists, chose the PAL system.

It was really a government imposed decision. One must remember that from 1964 to 1985 Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. By 1971 the TV stations, and I think also TV set makers, told the government that they were not yet ready for color TV, as it was too huge an investment, they told the government, If I remember correctly, that maybe they could be ready for color in 1974 or even by the early 1980's only! The Minister of Communications angrily told them that they better be ready for 1972 or there "would be consequences"... so it started in 1972 as the dictatorship really wanted color TV to show how good they were at "modernizing" the country. The color sets were so expensive that those of higher prices cost the same as a brand new car. It would take many years for the number of color TVs to surpass the number of B&W sets.

The first color transmission was the "Grape Fest" on the state of Rio Grande do Sul, on March, 31, 1972 ( anniversary of the military coup of 1964 ) and apparently they chose the "Grape Fest" because the daughter of the Minister of Communications was one of the Princesses of the Fest...

Well, but why the P.A.L.-M is quite different from Europeanen P.A.L. Probably 525 lines @ 30 frames was the standard for black and white television in Brazil, but if wikipedia isn't wrong, the chroma signal is different between P.A.L. M and the rest of P.A.L.

Brazil did indeed use 525 line 30 field for monochrome. I think with standard US channel spacings. So the obvious route to colour would have been NTSC but they decided, for reasons I don't know, to use PAL. At the time PAL gave freedom from various colour errors and was seen as superior to NTSC. PAL-M is a properly engineered 525 line PAL system. In practice all studios worked in NTSC, with transcoding to PAL-M for transmission.

The situation in Argentina was different. They had 625/50 monochrome but with US channel spacings. Can't use normal PAL or SECAM as a result. So they used PAL-N, a special version of PAL with a lower subcarrier frequency. Studios all worked in PAL-B and the output was transcoded for transmission.

Yes, the lower channel bandwidth required lower chroma subcarrier frequency.

Odds are PAL was selected since there was a large escaped Nazi presence running things back then that were thinking 'we want a German system not something designed by those filthy Americans'.

I wondered who used P.A.L.-N, but I was lazy too look for it. Now I found out.
Anyway, that thing with chanell spacing makes me now understand some things.
Because of Ceauşescu we had colour television in Romania only in 1983. At least we got P.A.L., not S.E.C.A.M.
I wonder how early Brazilian color sets looked like and if they where solid state or hybird or both.
Since I Romanian and Romanian and Portugese have roots in common, I can understand most of the add from the 1st post.

Our first color sets were hybrid - as far as I can tell. I have two in my collection ( a Sylvania and a Philco ):

The one from the top of the right image I guess it's an black and white one.

Yes, it is a B&W from 1957.