[ceebee23]

actually SECAM was designed like PAL to overcome the inherent phase problems of NTSC .....although the one technician I know who worked with SECAM (in France in the late 60s) said to me that in poor reception areas there were problems because the sets had problems identifying whether they were receiving a red or blue line...and the sets had no manual control to fix it!

But then early PAL sets suffered dreadfully from "Hanover Blinds" ....alternating bands of green and red as the set tried to sort out which line was in phase and which line was 180 degrees out of phase! (A problem only resolved by the use of a delay line in receivers...ironic because this was one of the reasons SECAM sets were more expensive ..which was one of the reasons PAL was selected in Britiain).

But I also know that the choice between the german developed PAL and French SECAM for Britain was a close run thing.

...of course I imagine chroma key etc would be a problem for CBS field sequential as well as SECAM ....