Who remembers how bad analogue television was?

Philips' design quality was usually reasonable in my experience.

EHT breathing?

I don't recall specific issues like that. I do recall how bad a picture some people would tolerate before having the set serviced. I also recall knowing that the quality of the content produced by the TV stations and the technical quality of the TV system were two completely different things. You might ask how bad digital television is if you're talking about the content. I can't remember when I last watched a broadcast TV show at the time it was broadcast.

Although they have a finite life, valves are good for high voltage and fairly high powers. And it was easier to stabilize a valve scan and EHT generator just by varying the pentode's control grid voltage.

Probably. They would have to be.

I suppose that's one of the problems with being "first past the post" - you get stuck with the system. The US had NTSC, valves, and 525 lines. In the UK colour broadcasting didn't start until over 12 years later - July 1967 - using PAL, transistors, and 625 lines. Most of western Europe was the same as the UK, but in France and eastern Europe it was SECAM and 819 lines. From what I understand, PAL was better than NTSC, and from what I remember, analogue colour in the UK wasn't bad at all.

I think you may be mis-remembering; something similar to the fault you describe was prevalent on B&W televisions which were built down to a price. Some of it was caused by average AGC and some was due to lack of DC coupling, or skimped DC restoration, in the video amplifier. Some of the better sets used back-porch AGC and, for the enthusiast, add-on circuits were published in Wireless World (designed by Mothersole, I think).

From the beginnings of colour television the designers recognised that all three video amplifiers had to be DC coupled but the AGC was much simpler because they used inverted modulation, so a sync pulse corresponding to 100% modulation was always available. I can't imagine Philips would have produced a model with such gross errors as you describe,. Was your own set faulty or was this a common insurmountable problem caused by NTSC and positive modulation on the system in use in the U.S. at the time?

In Europe, Philips and Mullard (their UK valve-making subsidiary) published large quantities of material to aid set designers and help them get the best out of their range of valves. I read it several years before the colour television service started in England and it included details on DC coupling and AGC. (The BBC did a lot of their preliminary experimental work using NTSC - but eventually decided to use PAL for the public broadcast system).

I always believed that made it impossible for them not to have newscasters with flesh that slowly shifted between ghastly green and purple tones (or was clamped to unnatural pale orange like the Donald's). NTSC was called Never Twice the Same Colour in the UK for good reason. PAL was self correcting. My Japanese sets could do both.

However, when I was in Japan I saw US style NTSC TV implemented correctly. It seems there was no reason that it could not be made to work well only that US makers couldn't be bothered to do it right.

Very early sets the colour was in pastel shades until they started doping the front screen with neodymium to take out the unwanted yellow component in the early phosphors (especially the blue). Barely gets a mention now but it made a big difference to colour saturation and purity. Put sets with and without Nd doping together and the difference was huge. But either one on their own would satisfy a punter. Premium price for the one with better more saturated colours.

When I was a kid we had an RCA 12" round-tube B+W TV, in a giant piece of furniture cabinet with a 12" speaker. It was all AC coupled, so the screen always averaged grey.

It made a pretty good liquor cabinet, after I scrounged it for parts.

We only had three channels, but the programming was better than what we have now.

The first TV I have memory of was an early 80s Motorola/Quasar 19" that my parents probably bought not long after I was born and looked a lot like this one:

Reception wasn't usually a problem we were 10 miles south of the main Boston-area antenna fields in Newton, just rabbit ears sufficed and it worked fine hooked up to a Nintendo...that served well into the 90s when we got a larger Mitsubishi tube-type TV that served well into the 2000s, and then that was about it for the tubes.

Are you sure that 1984 date is correct? By 1970 in the UK colour TVs used transistor signal processing stages and many had already changed to transistors for the power stages such as line and frame output as well as using chopper stabilised power supplies.

Typically they used some form of gated AGC to not be affected by the video modulation.

kw

Sony was notorious for not implementing PAL decoding fully by omitting the delay line and effectively processing PAL as if it was NTSC.

kw

Early TV had documentaries, science, concerts, live Play Of The Week, Kukla Fran and Ollie, westerns, variety shows.

Now we have superheroes, ultraviolence, and nonstop swearing.

We do get about an hour or so per week of decent stuff on PBS. Miss Marple or All Creatures sorts of things. Not much.

The first two colour TVs I recall owned by friends or family were about the time of Apollo 8 in 1968. Memorable for the Earth rise shot. Both were entirely valves and my uncle's caught fire leaving a nasty brown burn mark on their wool carpet and smoke damage on the ceiling.

The earliest was at a school friends house and was in pastel shades pre Nd glass. It was in colour but only just... Joe 90 launch was the first programme I can recall watching there in colour. Test cards in shops don't count.

I'd believe 1974 as a date for hybrid colour TVs that almost worked correctly and didn't need a service engineer visiting them every other week. By 1980 I'm pretty sure they were almost entirely semiconductor based.

I recall sound on vision being a bit of a problem too with certain types of check or dogtooth suits or other high contrast periodic fabrics.

I think that was mostly from the shunt regulator tube that some early colour TVs used to regulate the EHT. The diode mostly didn't experience large voltages and large currents simultaneously, but the shunt regulator did.

It sounds like you just had a crap telly.

I find the only thing worse about it was the resolution.

If reception conditions were poor, yes the picture could degrade a bit, but that is far preferable to the behaviour of digital systems that completely drop out halfway through the movie if the rain gets too heavy. If you're watching an off-air recording that is particularly frustrating, because moving the aerial could only have been done in the past. A good outdoor aerial is much more necessary than it used to be.

I don't know, and I expect it depends on many things.

For satellite (12GHz) certainly yes, unless you have an extra-big dish. Not sure about terrestrial at UHF.

This is repost, because the original seems to have disappeared into a Usenet black-hole. At least, I can't see it.

Also, it was a Philips TV.

I was living in France, and there was a legal requirement for new televisions to have a SCART socket. There was a video output pin that was specified as being 1v peak to peak. So the sync pulses should have been 0.3v. In practice they varied between that and perhaps twice that, depending on the image brightness.

Sylvia.

Either I'm immune to that, or my past was truly awful. Given that I'm still alive, I suspect the former [*].

As a slight aside, I tried watching episodes of the first series of Star Trek a few years back. It was rather obvious that the display panels on the Enterprise's bridge were actually back-lit paper. Good enough for TVs of the time, apparently, but not for modern digital displays.

Sylvia.

My father bought a Ferguson 19" colour TV at the end of 1970 that was fully semiconductor (it was my first term at university and he got it just before I came back for Christmas). It seemed to work fairly well - he would tinker with it but I don't remember it needing any significant repair. I gather it was one of the first such sets.

The set in the common room at university was an older valve based one with no blue channel but it was surprisingly watchable and it didn't stop all the students filling the room to bursting point when Top of the Pops was on on Thursday night.

The first domestic UK colour sets were valve-based. However, it wasn't long before transistor sets came in. See page 22 at