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A lot of really interesting sets at Marcel's museum, interesting how different trends in design evolve. I do rather like the look of the fully exposed CRT face, probably because it's so different. I've never seen an American TV like that. That second Telefunken color set is a very nice looking one, I like the clean lines and the balanced design. Another thing I've noticed is that it seems to be more popular in the european sets to have the controls mounted lower, and the speaker above them - exactly opposite most American televisons, where the controls are normally mounted closer to the top of the set. Another big difference in the apperance of the European sets is the lack of tuning knobs, something that persisted in the US until the 80's. Nearly every American TV from the 70's will have two knobs, one for VHF (Channels 1-13, and a position to select UHF) and one for UHF (14 - 83). My guess is that the European sets didn't have to worry about dealing with such a large number of channels, so pushbutton tuning was practical even without digital tuners. I'm not familliar with the TV system outside the US, I know that most of Europe uses PAL, and France uses SECAM, but I don't know about the channel allocation. Just, from looking at the sets, there are six pushbuttons on that Telefunken, so what, six channels?
Now, that's not to suggest that the US has more channels, we just have more channel numbers. To prevent overlapping transmitters in different areas, the stations are spread around the band a little. It's not uncommon to only be able to pick up three channels in an area, and a couple weak UHF stations.
-Ian
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