TVs compatible, from one continent to the next??

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <slrniir7kk.dpg.gsm@cable.mendelson.com>,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm@mendelson.com> wrote:

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article <igirlg$86a$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:
In every other respect, NTSC is objectively superior to PAL.

Explain how 525 lines gives superior resolution to 625?

Because it does it 30 times a second instead of 25. Less bluring in live
action.

That isn't the definition of resolution.

If 30 fps is needed for 'less blurring in live action' how come Hollywood
managed at 24 fps for the large screen?

--
*Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <igk8l8$m39$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

Don't think anyone with sense claims any of these are
universally superior. Each had merits and de-merits.
Think it goes something like this:-

NTSC gives the best pictures in the studio.
SECAM records best.
PAL transmits best.

#1 is meaningless, because "in the studio", you can display RGB directly,
without encoding.

It would be a very stupid studio that did so if it were intended for
analogue transmission.

--
*Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <igkajs$blp$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

By the way... PAL has no more /horizontal/ resolution than NTSC. (The
bandwidth/line is about the same.) The extra hundred scanning lines is
nice, but the eye judges resolution more by horizontal resolution.

The vertical/horizontal resolution relationship is correct with PAL 625
lines. Unless US eyes differ from the rest of the world.

--
*Be more or less specific *

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

If 30 fps is needed for 'less blurring in live action' how come Hollywood
managed at 24 fps for the large screen?

Viewing distance. Large screens are watched much farther away than TVs.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <slrniiqh2b.5ne.gsm@cable.mendelson.com>,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm@mendelson.com> wrote:

The political reason was to keep the UK electronics companies in work, to
avoid cheap sets made in much larger quantities in the US.

When colour started in the UK, it was only on one UHF channel out of 3.
The other two were still 405 line VHF. So the first colour sets were dual
standard.

Given the US never attempted to make sets to the UK mono standard of 405
lines - which pre-dated any US one - just why do you think they'd have
been interested in any other UK market? A few years later, UK colour sets
were UHF only when the other channels went colour.

I also doubt any US manufactured set would have been cheaper in the UK
after transport and setting up a service/dealer network, etc. US cars, for
example, have never been competitive here, price wise.

Your idea that the whole world should adopt US standards regardless of
local conditions was just to protect their home industries says much.
It's the reason why the far east has taken over the manufacture of such
things. They tend to make what people want, rather than what the
manufacturers think they should have. And the UK is equally as guilty.

--
*When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty*

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <slrniirfga.fvg.gsm@cable.mendelson.com>,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm@mendelson.com> wrote:

If 30 fps is needed for 'less blurring in live action' how come
Hollywood managed at 24 fps for the large screen?

Viewing distance. Large screens are watched much farther away than TVs.

I take it light blurs with distance, then?

Does that make large screen TVs ok at 25 fps?

--
*Income tax service - We‘ve got what it takes to take what you've got.

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <igkgko$iuc$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

It would be a very stupid studio that did so if it were intended
for analogue transmission.

How about "under ideal conditions"?

Have you ever worked in TV production? There are very good reasons why you
wouldn't watch RGB in the studio if it is to be encoded later.

--
*A boiled egg is hard to beat*

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

When colour started in the UK, it was only on one UHF channel out of 3.
The other two were still 405 line VHF. So the first colour sets were dual
standard.

Where they? I have never seen a dual standard (405/625) line TV set on a
website, listed on various collectors pages, nor do any of the people who
have video tours of their 405 line TV collections on youtube have any.

I'm not saying they did not exist, but if they did, people are going to a lot
of trouble to omit them. You'd figure the guy who has one of the
last 405 line TV sets (the model, not the actual set) and proudly shows it,
would have one of the first 405/625 sets too.

Given the US never attempted to make sets to the UK mono standard of 405
lines - which pre-dated any US one - just why do you think they'd have
been interested in any other UK market? A few years later, UK colour sets
were UHF only when the other channels went colour.

Well, they would not. But in 1956 back when the UK was still stuck in the
1930's, you could buy a US color TV off the salesroom floor. If the BBC wanted
to go to color, they could of just adopted the US system, and let people
import US sets with transformers until one with 240 volt power supplies
became available.

BTW, what you said about 405/625 line sets in general was not true, BBC one
was a dual service, the second BBC channel was never 405. It started in
1963, two years before there were color broadcasts.

As for tuners, ALL US sets had UHF tuners by the summer of 1964.

I also doubt any US manufactured set would have been cheaper in the UK
after transport and setting up a service/dealer network, etc. US cars, for
example, have never been competitive here, price wise.

Bad example. UK cars are mirror images of US ones, the only difference
between an NTSC set receiveing NTSC signals in the UK versus the US was the
power line voltage. An external transformer would have been around $25, which
on a $1,000 item was trivial.

We've long since established that by 1956 the power line frequency did
not matter.

Your idea that the whole world should adopt US standards regardless of
local conditions was just to protect their home industries says much.

WTF? Now you are projecting. Since PAL is the original NTSC standard as
proposed, the UK had no TV network to speak of (just left overs from the
1930's), why not adpot an off the shelf technology that's already in use.

People wanted color TVs in 1956, they did not want a british system with
little or no benefit except that it would take nine years before the
first broadcast.

In the 1950's the concept of COTS (commerical off the shelf technology) did not
exist and I'm not sure it has ever existed at the BBC. To be blunt, if the
BBC had adopted the RCA system 100%, there would have been color TV in the
UK in 1957.

So what real benefit did PAL provide?

It's the reason why the far east has taken over the manufacture of such
things. They tend to make what people want, rather than what the
manufacturers think they should have.

Actually they did not. They started making what they wanted you to buy, but
at a price so low you could afford to buy it and live with the missing features.

Look at VHS. VHS forced out all the other systems because the EU was going to
impose VCR quotas. To prevent it, the Japanese manufacturers, except for Sony
stopped making PAL and SECAM VCRs in favor of NTSC ones. They literally sold
the NTSC ones BELLOW COST just to keep the factories running.
(look up "dumping" and VCR).

People did not want VHS VCRs, they wanted BETAMAX VCRs. But when the equivalent
VHS VCR was on sale for half of a Sony, they bought them anyway.

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article <igk8l8$m39$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:
Don't think anyone with sense claims any of these are
universally superior. Each had merits and de-merits.
Think it goes something like this:-

NTSC gives the best pictures in the studio.
SECAM records best.
PAL transmits best.

#1 is meaningless, because "in the studio", you can display RGB directly,
without encoding.

It would be a very stupid studio that did so if it were intended for
analogue transmission.

It would be very stupid to make a statement like that when you know
nothing of how the video was processed. Some video processing systems
could use either composite or RGB+Sync, but decoding the video first
added more timing errors that had to be corrected elsewhere in the
system.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article <igkgko$iuc$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:
It would be a very stupid studio that did so if it were intended
for analogue transmission.

How about "under ideal conditions"?

Have you ever worked in TV production? There are very good reasons why you
wouldn't watch RGB in the studio if it is to be encoded later.

Really. Name ONE that you didn't pull out of your ass.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article <yNqdnS4xfenEyLDQnZ2dnUVZ_tqdnZ2d@earthlink.com>,
Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
Back in 1970 I took course "TV production" in my Senior year.
We had a nice 1" tape deck and a mixer/fader console along with
two dolly mounted cameras.

By 1971, the students had trahed enough of the equipment, so
that they were using a 1/2" Sone deck and hand helds on tripods.

Sigh, what a waste of studio grade gear.

No kidding. One of the local high schools gets new equipment about
every other year when they need to learn on beat up old junk.

Big snag with pro gear at one time was it needed pros to set it up and
maintain it. And then there was the size.

What are you babbling about, now?


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article <ArWdnX-ND8EQnLDQnZ2dnUVZ_tydnZ2d@earthlink.com>,
Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
So why the mask on the monitors if 'proper camera work made sure that
the active portion of any image was properly framed'? Cameramen not
trusted?

maybe on your planet. A cameraman has a lit of things to pay
attention to. The lines on his monitor make it easy to frame the shot.
Not that you would know.

Can you make up your mind if you're talking about what a camera has
available on the viewfinder or what you'd find on a control room monitor?

Only time I saw an electronic mask displayed on a production control
room monitor was when things were destined for 16mm telerecording only.

And why would the engineer in charge of the actual pictures care
about home overscan? That would be left to the production side.

Notice you've omitted to answer this...

No matter what answer yo got you would still pull out a ruler to
measure yor dick so there was no reason to give you the pleasure.

Seems to me you were a 'back room boy' with no experience of production.
Gawd help us if you were responsible for providing the facilities others
had to work round.

I produced & directed a live newscast for a year in '73 & 74 at Ft.
Greely, AK.

I built a 1.3 MW EIRP UHF TV station on Ch. 58 in Destin Fl.,
starting with an empty building.

I've run studio cameras, loaded 16 mm film and 35 mm slides for
actualities between switching camera shots in master control.

I've climbed TV broadcast towers and built a remote tower light
monitor that I designed. It met FCC and FAA requirements. I had 14
hours to design, build and install the equipment in two cities to
monitor the tower lights at a STL relay point.

I've built mobile production vans, and installed the first emergency
alert system on any CATV system on any US military base.

I repaired any and everything that needed it at three different
stations.

I installed PBX and telethon phone systems.

I installed and repaired C-band microwave equipment, along with 7 &
11 GHz STL equipment

A good Broadcast Engineer can do any job that's required. What have
you done, other than post bullshit? What was the equivalent of the FCC
First Phone license that was required to be a broadcast Engineer and did
you have it?


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article <x_ednSj9__42nrDQnZ2dnUVZ_s6dnZ2d@earthlink.com>,
Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
You appear only to have heard of RCA cameras.

Sigh. You appear to be an idiot. RCA & GE made most of the studio
cameras in the US.

I don't live in the US.

And I thank God for that.

A few stations got screwed when they bought Philips
cameras that had no factory support and few spare parts.

Pretty well the same as the few UK companies that bought RCA, then.

Really? You could get almost any part for RCA equipment, even on 40
year old equipment. It wasn't cheap, but it was availible, and a lot of
it could be delivered overnight. The first thing Philips did was tell
the US scustomers that there were no spare camera cables, no bulk cable,
and no new connectors to repair the flimsy crap that connected the
cameras to the CCUs.

Well, I'm trying to think of a US broadcaster that designed much of its
own equipment. If you want to debate the BBC and 'state of the art'.

Sigh. Your ignorance is amazing. RCA & GE owned TV networks. Take
a guess who designed and built their equipment?

Can you name a broadcast use for a single tube colour camera? Apart
from stunt stuff where it would be destroyed.

Yes they were used for ENG before color CCD cameras were availible.

I'm talking about proper broadcasting, not news. News will use domestic
shot pictures if it suits them. Please stick to top end.

ENG was substanard at the BBC? Figures.

If you consider 2" Ampex industrial video, you might argue. The
mobile production units were several tractor trailers full, and they
had just bought the first Tektronix U-matic decks built.

U-matic? Only ever used for news stuff here. And office viewing before
VHS.

1" C Format ruled until the arrival of Beta SP and MII.

So, you used 2" until the other formats were availible?

Which part of 1" C format don't you understand?

What don't you understand? 2" predated all of the other formats.

Umatic was
second generation video for use in classrooms, dubbed from the broadcast
grade masters. Long beofre VHS or any beta crap was availible. I used
1" Sony at WACX in orlando for the master edit suit. OTOH, I had 13
Sony U-Matics at the transmitter site for the LaCarte Video automation
system. WACX had better video quality than most of the other stations
in the market. The worst used Beta and it was obvious.

Seems to me you know little about broadcast standards.

Seems to me that you don't know anything abot US brodacsting or any
of the various standards involved.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

It would be a very stupid studio that did so
if it were intended for analogue transmission.

How about "under ideal conditions"?

Have you ever worked in TV production? There are very
good reasons why you wouldn't watch RGB in the studio
if it is to be encoded later.

No, but I understood what you were getting at. You have to see the image as
the consumer will see it.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

I wonder just how available were the delay lines needed when NTSC was
introduced? They were quite an expensive component years later.

NTSC delay lines for TV sets were about $3 for replacments in the mid
'60s. I only saw one open delay line and one with physical damage in
40+ years. The open delay line removed the luminanve signal, leaving
only moving colored splotches on a black screen.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

It would be a very stupid studio that did so
if it were intended for analogue transmission.

How about "under ideal conditions"?

Have you ever worked in TV production? There are very
good reasons why you wouldn't watch RGB in the studio
if it is to be encoded later.

No, but I understood what you were getting at. You have to see the image as
the consumer will see it.

Which is what the master monitors are for, after all the video
processing and routing.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article <slrniirj8q.gre.gsm@cable.mendelson.com>,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm@mendelson.com> wrote:

When colour started in the UK, it was only on one UHF channel out of
3. The other two were still 405 line VHF. So the first colour sets
were dual standard.

Where they? I have never seen a dual standard (405/625) line TV set on a
website, listed on various collectors pages, nor do any of the people who
have video tours of their 405 line TV collections on youtube have any.

I'm not saying they did not exist, but if they did, people are going to
a lot of trouble to omit them. You'd figure the guy who has one of the
last 405 line TV sets (the model, not the actual set) and proudly shows
it, would have one of the first 405/625 sets too.

You can't have looked very hard. Dual standard sets - both colour and
monochrome - were plentiful at one time.

Given the US never attempted to make sets to the UK mono standard of
405 lines - which pre-dated any US one - just why do you think they'd
have been interested in any other UK market? A few years later, UK
colour sets were UHF only when the other channels went colour.

Well, they would not. But in 1956 back when the UK was still stuck in
the 1930's, you could buy a US color TV off the salesroom floor.

Some could - if they had the money.

If the
BBC wanted to go to color, they could of just adopted the US system, and
let people import US sets with transformers until one with 240 volt
power supplies became available.

If the US makers wanted to sell sets in the UK they could have made them
to UK spec. But your strange logic seems against this.

BTW, what you said about 405/625 line sets in general was not true, BBC
one was a dual service, the second BBC channel was never 405. It started
in 1963, two years before there were color broadcasts.

BBC 2 started off as UHF 625 mono. Because it was planned to start colour
there in the future. BBC1 and ITV were 405 (VHF) only until they too went
colour on UHF.

As for tuners, ALL US sets had UHF tuners by the summer of 1964.

I presume you mean all new ones?

I also doubt any US manufactured set would have been cheaper in the UK
after transport and setting up a service/dealer network, etc. US cars,
for example, have never been competitive here, price wise.

Bad example. UK cars are mirror images of US ones,

Mirror image? Have you ever looked at the design of a car? UK makers
managed to produce pretty well every model in RHD and LHD. As did just
about every other in the world. Another example of 'take what you get or
leave it'?

the only difference between an NTSC set receiveing NTSC signals in the
UK versus the US was the power line voltage. An external transformer
would have been around $25, which on a $1,000 item was trivial.

And even more trivial and cheaper to make a new power supply?

We've long since established that by 1956 the power line frequency did
not matter.

It *can* matter to power supplies.

Your idea that the whole world should adopt US standards regardless of
local conditions was just to protect their home industries says much.

WTF? Now you are projecting. Since PAL is the original NTSC standard as
proposed, the UK had no TV network to speak of (just left overs from the
1930's), why not adpot an off the shelf technology that's already in use.

Because it was so poor. As anyone who had seen the actual results in the
'50s would remember...

People wanted color TVs in 1956, they did not want a british system with
little or no benefit except that it would take nine years before the
first broadcast.

Where did I ever say the US should have used UK technology? It's you who
are saying the reverse.

In the 1950's the concept of COTS (commerical off the shelf technology)
did not exist and I'm not sure it has ever existed at the BBC. To be
blunt, if the BBC had adopted the RCA system 100%, there would have been
color TV in the UK in 1957.

And we'd have been saddled with an inferior system relying on imported
equipment. Those coffins of cameras not suited to UK production methods.

So what real benefit did PAL provide?

The best TV service in the world.

It's the reason why the far east has taken over the manufacture of such
things. They tend to make what people want, rather than what the
manufacturers think they should have.

Actually they did not. They started making what they wanted you to buy,
but at a price so low you could afford to buy it and live with the
missing features.

Look at VHS. VHS forced out all the other systems because the EU was
going to impose VCR quotas. To prevent it, the Japanese manufacturers,
except for Sony stopped making PAL and SECAM VCRs in favor of NTSC ones.

JVC cornered the VCR rental market with VHS. But you could buy a variety
of makes including Sony BetaMax. At the same time as the Philips VCC
system. VHS was the most popular system for all the wrong reasons - as
elsewhere.

They literally sold the NTSC ones BELLOW COST just to keep the factories
running. (look up "dumping" and VCR).

People did not want VHS VCRs, they wanted BETAMAX VCRs. But when the
equivalent VHS VCR was on sale for half of a Sony, they bought them
anyway.

So why didn't your manufactures with that vast economy of scale compete?
You found the money to put man on the moon but couldn't make a domestic
VCR. Even with all the expertise of Ampex.

--
*It ain't the size, it's... er... no, it IS ..the size.

Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

 

[Meat Plow]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:14:25 -0500, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

I wonder just how available were the delay lines needed when NTSC was
introduced? They were quite an expensive component years later.


NTSC delay lines for TV sets were about $3 for replacments in the mid
'60s. I only saw one open delay line and one with physical damage in
40+ years. The open delay line removed the luminanve signal, leaving
only moving colored splotches on a black screen.

I saw 1 open delay line. In an RCA tube set back in 1980. I might have
paid less than 10 bucks for it. Never saw another failed.



--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

 

[Phil Hobbs]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article<gf-dnRzoB7l3YbDQnZ2dnUVZ_qmdnZ2d@earthlink.com>,
Michael A. Terrell<mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
U-matic? Only ever used for news stuff here. And office viewing
before VHS.

1" C Format ruled until the arrival of Beta SP and MII.

So, you used 2" until the other formats were availible?

Which part of 1" C format don't you understand?


What don't you understand? 2" predated all of the other formats.

Perhaps it's a language thing. Look it up if you don't understand 'ruled'.

"Television is a vast wasteland."

-- Newton N. Minow (then Chairman of the FCC)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article <4didnYEd_J00arDQnZ2dnUVZ_oidnZ2d@earthlink.com>,
Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
It would be a very stupid studio that did so if it were intended for
analogue transmission.

It would be very stupid to make a statement like that when you know
nothing of how the video was processed. Some video processing systems
could use either composite or RGB+Sync, but decoding the video first
added more timing errors that had to be corrected elsewhere in the
system.

Which video processing systems? I take it you mean something not used in
the studio?

But pray tell of a composite video studio which had RGB available from
anything other than a single camera, etc.

You just keep showing more and more ignrance. All the studio cameras
had RGB outputs. The Vital Industries video switcher and the Squeeze
Zoom had RGB inputs and outputs. The studios had cameras & monitors
only. Master control did every thing else. Just admit that you are
absolutely clueless about what was done, and how in a NTSC brodcast
plant.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.