Down Under TVs
 

Just saw this on ebay, and thought it was cool.

http://imagehost.vendio.com/bin/imag...astorroyal.jpg

http://cgi.ebay.com/ASTOR-TELEVISION...QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/THORN-ATLAS-TELE...QQcmdZViewItem

I have a similar 23" Astor Princess set here which is from 1962. The set in this does look earlier, but I don't think it's from 1956 (the year that TV started in Australia).

It's been a long time since I've seen others to compare, but from memory they were better made than the Pye and Thorn. I seem to remember Astor sticking with point to point wiring after Pye and Thorn had switched to PCBs.

I think Astor was gone by the time we color in 1975, at least I've never seen an Astor color set.

Astor was brought out by Philips in around 1974 just before colour stated, PYE was also consumed by Philips in around 1978 as the last of the PYE's had used Philips chassis. Thorn was brought by AWA to become AWA Thorn, Remember the TCE 4000 chassis & TCE 3504 chassis used in some early AWA & Thorn colour television just before they switched to useing Mitsubishi chassis's which were more reliable then TCE chasis's that they were using at the time.

Why did it take so long for you fellers to get color? Was it the size of the market, gov't ineptitude, or did color sets not want to work Down Under?

You don't know much about Australian history do ya mate? Prior to building the Outback Fence in 1974, Australian progress was slowed down by bands of wild kangaroos, which would go into test labs and kick over prototype roundies with their strong feet. :yes: Heck, everybody knows that the Valiant Charger R/T was created just so Australian citizens could flee the crazed 'roo attacks!

http://www.chargerclubofwa.asn.au/Me.../bmce38_03.jpg

After the "great fence" was finished, Australian society entered a golden age, not only perfecting Coluor TV, but inventing things like gigantic cans of beer...

http://www.phrogs.net/R_and_Fosters.jpg

music...

http://eil.com/newgallery/Men-At-Wor...its-255143.jpg

food..

http://thhsmusic.com/Images/Outback_Steakhouse_Logo.jpg

women...

http://www.graphicmuscle.net/photos/bev_pool_sm.jpg

And finally, this obnoxious fool...

http://cdn.compuserve.com/gallery/i/...529323_Max.jpg





No charge for the history lesson Sandy :thmbsp:

Dammitt, Carmine- I was outta Windex 'n' paper towels to clean the monitor off when I spit supper all over it when that Perfesser Irwin showed up...he's a Bee-Yoo-Tee...<grin>

PHOOEY on the Valiant Charger... Give me that Hilux double cab Diesel Toyota in the background :thmbsp: !!!!!!

Charles

I don't know exactly what the story is behind Australia getting color, but considering we got B&W in 56, 75 for color doesn't seem that late. My guess without actually looking anything up is that we were following England, but then they got color in what? 67? I don't know if an NTSC system was ever tried here.

I know that some of the earliest color sets here were essentially English sets with VHF tuners. Those hybrid Decca sets are almost the only color sets I've seen here with tubes in them. They used tubes in the horizontal output and possibly in the vertical section (it's been a long long time since I've seen one). I say almost as I've seen at least one set brought over from England that had been fitted with a tube VHF tuner salvaged from a B&W set.

At any rate I'm glad we went with PAL. I've seen both and while NTSC can look good I prefer PAL. It just seems to do some things better. I haven't really looked into why, but while NTSC from Laserdisc or DVD can look very good (I've haven't seen over the air NTSC) NTSC from VHS or a game console looks noticably worse than PAL (though wherever possible I use RGB).

Maybe if things worked out differently we could have ended up with the worst of all worlds, 405 line, 50Hz, NTSC.

Yeah, well, I guess the question should be why was TV so late in coming to Oz in the 1st place ? I can see 1956 in some 3rd world shithole, or Lower Albania, but Australia suffered from neither of these afflictions. You guys were & are, a large, modern prosperous nation, a member of the Western alliance & the British Commonwealth. Just doesn't make sense...

Maybe it was a culture thing? I can remember when I was little, in the 70s, a very negative sentiment among the stuffy society crowd regarding TV. Some people thought that TV would bring the country to ruin, and to have a TV set installed in your livingroom was on an etiquette par with farting in church. If you had one, it was to be hidden or disguised so that dignified guests would be unaware you had one. (hence all those sets with doors, and ones that looked like coffee tables, etc)... Or better yet, the TV was put in a spare room in the back of the house. Times sure changed! Now they say you're nobody unless you have a 60" HDTV flat screen in the livingroom; to blast away disruptively at max volume when you have guests trying to visit.

After all, I have yet to meet a rude Australian :thmbsp: !

Charles

[Straight line alert!]
You were in the stuffy society crowd? What happened?

Hey - maybe they wouldn't have hidden their TVs if they had PAL. :D

Ho-Ho-Ho... It was actually more like me on the outside looking in... Indeed my family didn't have a TV in the livingroom, but for us it was that we couldn't afford one. By the time I was born, the family finally had a GE 21" console that my Grandma won in a raffle at the Vernon Market in South Central LA... Then in '72, my mother bought a 12" Hitachi color set at Fedco.

Charles

I think I once read somewhere where there was an Austrailian commission set up for the uses of television. It was something along the lines of a big event would spur them on to do something with TV. For example I think the opening of the television service in the 50's was spurred on by the hosting of the Olympics. I'm not sure about color though.

PAL can give a wider gamut than NTSC (more colors) mostly because most European implimentations give a little more bandwidth to the signal, I'm not sure how wide the channels are in Austrailia, so that may or may not be the case.

NTSC generally looks better on an NTSC set though. I've seen NTSC on multi-standard and PAL sets that can playback the pseudo-NTSC pictures that are generated by some VCR's and it doesn't look like it should. The blacks are very crushed and the colors tend to be washed out. The reason is that the NTSC and PAL color gamuts don't line up perfectly. So what is reproduced as one color on NTSC would then be reproduced differently on PAL. Also American NTSC uses a 7.5 IRE level for its blacks. PAL uses 0 IRE. The end result is that your blacks (and whites) don't line up either. If its any consolation PAL pictures look rather overprocessed when you see them on an NTSC set.

The reasoning for PAL was to make terestrial broadcasting more reliable. In the end, most people in the States use cable which sort of moots the PAL advantage since the signal is closed sent via closed circuit RF.

All that being said I've seen bad and good pictures on both systems. As far as what you could get that would be worse, I'd say that would have been 405 line with SECAM color. SECAM (as the French use it) has half the color resolution of either NTSC or PAL and uses AM sound (because they use FM to transmit the color carriers). SECAM was also developed to solve the phase problems with terestrial broadcasting, but ended up introducing new ones of its own.

Oh well, we're all using the best television standards the 1930's could supply.

David

PAL to me has large area flicker, the screen refresh rate being 50Hz is quite visible to my eyes. 60Hz (NTSC) isn't anywhere near as bad. Though I found that I have to set my VGA computer monitor displays to 75Hz to avoid large area flicker. From what I understand, the brightness of the display makes flicker worse, for a given refresh rate. Back in the day when color CRTs were not at all bright (you'd have to draw the shades on the windows during the day to watch the soap operas) 50Hz refresh may not have flickered.

Heard that some fancy modern sets use field store memories so the screen can be refreshed at 100Hz rate to get rid of the large area flicker on bright displays

Never fear, y'all...HDTV, w/ONE world standard will be here in 1980...1985...1990...1995...2000...2005...2009..An ' this time I MEAN it, dammit !!

Yes we in Europe have plenty of 100 hz televisions. They solved the flickering problem but worsened the picture quality introducing a lot of digital artifacts. A 100 hz picture seems unnatural as compared to a plain 50 hz tv. If you have messages scrolling on the screen horizontally then they often appear doubled making them unreadable...Lcd made things worse. I wonder where all this tv technology progress is but people seems just to look only how fancy is to have a tv hang on the wall...Too bad!!! :sigh:

I have two 100hz TV's & I find them easier in the eyes then a large screen 50hz set. The first set a Grundig set from 1994 & a 2000 Philips which has a much better picture then the earlier Grundig. The Philips set uses what is called a Falconic chip that avaridges out the 2 fields to minimise the effect of double images with scrolling writing or fast moving objects.

The only thing about 100hz sets is the picture is always softer looking & is made to look sharp by using what is called a VM coil on the CRT neck near the convergance magnets. The basic idea is the feed in the luminance signal & amplify that to speed up the electron beams with the transistion from balck to white & thus sharpen the image.

The NTSC playback on PAL TV function offered on most recent VCR does look awful. Some do have an option to output NTSC when playing back an NTSC tape rather than converting it to PAL. This does look better on a multistandard TV, but I'm not sure that even this is a true NTSC signal as it on one of my Sony PVM monitors it just gets confused and gives a flickering green/purple image.

I do have a 13" Hitachi NTSC only set, but it doesn't have AV inputs so I'm yet to see if it does look better than my multistandard sets.

I've never seen SECAM and I doubt I want to. I thought pretty much everyone that once used SECAM had converted over to PAL by now.

As for 50Hz flicker, I've only ever found it objectionable on some cheap nasty 80cm sets. I just don't notice it on smaller sets and some better large screen sets, but I guess I am used to it. Most sets will handle PAL at 60Hz and you can get this out of many DVD players and most game consoles. I recently picked up several Loewe sets. I'm pretty sure at least the Calida 5672 (currently awaiting a flyback) is 100Hz, so eventually I'll get to see if it's an improvement. I do have a scan doubler that ups PAL/NTSC video to VGA, but I rarely use it due to the artifacts it introduces.

I am familiar with the 100Hz-problems. In 1996 my grandparents bought a pretty expensive 28" Nokia 100Hz TV. At the time, it was a great set, but to my great supprise it lasted for only 4 years. It had sound, but showed only a horizontal white line on the screen. My guess would be a bad v-(op)amp, i think both Nokia, Finlux and Luxor had too small heatsinks on the v-amps, which by the way was usually placed on the circuit board on the CRT base. Last summer my father bought a used Philips 100Hz widescreen (from about 2002-2003) in the same price range, and it got a much better picture, so clearly something has gotten better over the years. My mother has a Finlux widescreen (50Hz) from 2003, and that is absolutely not a good set. Actually, all my old sets outruns the picture on the Finlux, and most of the old ones has better sound too. Hope the v-amp in the Finlux dies soon...

Early AWA TV on eBay Australia...
 

Back to the subject on early Aussie TV's, Whilst surfing the net today I found this specimin on eBay Australia.

It is a 1958 AWA 209C with a short neck 17in CRT that was first used in Aust TV's in around 1958 before they went to 110deg CRT's in around '59-'60.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/TV-Radiola-De...ayphotohosting

Is there anyone in the Melbourne area that could save this one from the landfill.....

Cool. I had a very similar set years ago. It had the same chassis, crt and knobs, but was in a shorter cabinet with the speakers at the sides rather than below the controls. It was going to be a special project, but unfortunately I had to get rid of it in a prior move. I tried to give it away back then but there were no takers.

If I had more space I'd bid on it. It does have a couple bids, so it will be spared from the tip.

Looks a lot like an American made TV inside, other than the lack of a cheater cord connector for the mains/powerline. Is that blue sticker on the back of the chassis the TV receiver license that I heard was required in Europe and Australia?

http://audiokarma.org/forums/attachm...chmentid=16851

I like the artwork used on the back covers of these Australian sets. Almost ashame to have it facing the wall! Now, what was the connection (if any) between this Radiola and RCA?

My thoughts exactly! That looks frighteningly similar to an early 50s RCA... Cabinet style, and even the chassis. I bet it must be related. Tyrant-Murderer-General Sarnoff would NEVER NEVER have allowed anyone to use the name RADIOLA. His Mafia would have gone to Australia, bankrupted and driven to suicide every TV inventor and corporate head, and stopped all production of all TV sets for about 100 years.

Charles

The blue sticker isn't a TV license. It's been a long time since I've seen one, but from memory it is says something to the effect of "This AWA TV is covered by the following patents" and a list of patent numbers.

A connection between RCA and AWA wouldn't suprise me. Their early B&W sets resemble American sets more than they resemble English or European sets.

I'll see if I can find any pictures of some of the later chassis, maybe you guys on that side of the pond will recognise them.

That's what I was thinking too, but apparently not..! See:
http://www.radiola.co.nz/aboutus.asp

Looks like AWA/Radiola has been around for quite a while (and in fact been selling radios under the Radiola name since 1924), and doesn't appear to have had any relationship with RCA or Victor. Huh.

On a related note, it always seemed kinda interesting to me that while RCA is long-gone in the USA, the old Victor Talking Machine company still lives-- well, their old Japanese subsidiary, anyway (Victor Company of Japan). ...Which we know of as JVC, though they still use the Victor name and "Nipper" logo on their products for the Japanese market. (They can't in the USA, though, since RCA (now GE) has the rights to the Victor name and logo in the USA on consumer electronics products.)

I have at least one Radiola radio set from the late 40s, made by RCA, just a plain brown bakelite AA5. I don't know why they offered the seperate Radiola line. (no mention of RCA on the front, only on the bottom label.) (I think it says RCA Radio Sales Co. on the bottom, so I guess a different division of the company sold these?)

I would guess that those RCA "Radiola"-marked sets from the 40's would
have been mostly just to keep the trademark alive. "Radiola" was a name that RCA used on (I think) all of their radios in their early days, but they phased it out that moniker in the early 30's or so.

While RCA seemed to eventually stop using the Radiola name, they did seem to recycle the Victrola trademark (which they got from their purchase of Victor) for various purposes from time to time. Seems like all the RCA pre-packaged phonographs from the 1950's-era got badged with the Victrola name somewhere. ...Though that at least makes sense, since "Victrola" was originally supposed to indicate an internal horn phonograph, those would have been the 50's-modern equivalent (though Victor had originally further distinguished electrified phonos with the "Electrola" name). Then at some point, RCA Records took the Victrola name and made it into a sort of "budget" record label for classical music (sort of a low-cost alternative to RCA's premium "Red Seal" classical label).
I wonder what happened to the Victrola name after that, though. If RCA was still around and was still manufacturing audio equipment, would we be able to go to the store today and pick up an RCA "Digital Victrola" CD player..? What if RCA had called their Selectavision CED videodisc players "Video Victrolas" instead..?

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