SECAM anyone?

[ceebee23]

mmmm ....well as for PAL ....the development took some time ..and you are right it is essentially a development of NTSC designed purely to overcome the issue of phase error.

The concept of alternating phase line by line was in fact developed conceptually during the development of NTSC but proved impractical apparently.

It took Telefunken some time to iron out the problems and even they had serious issues, as I said above, with so-called "Hannover Blinds".

And what of the Lea Francis? Bet I just amazed you that a Yank knows about that marque! Someone recently obtained the rights to the name and has built at least a prototype but haven't heard anything more about it lately.

Personally, I prefer the Lotus Elise's styling. But one of my all time favorites would have to be the Lancia Stratos. I wonder if any of them were taped while rallying on a SECAM system (on topic content of this post LOL)

Anthony

[Telecolor 3007]

Well, SECAM cames from "Sequential a memory". The sistem is working almost as PAL, but the colour signals are brodcasted one after another (first time the red color signal, after that the green colour signal, and last the blue colour signal). In PAL and NTSC the color signals are broadcatsed in the same time.
The USSR and the majorty of Eastern Europe countries (except former Iugoslavya and ROMANIA, which used PAL), adopted the SECAM standard beceause they didn't want taht the Western tv sets to work in their countyes. But, I heard that the West-German colot tv sets could also work on SECAM (I knew a few pesrons that had color tv sets before 1983, and they watched Bulgarian color tv programs that where broadcasted in SECAM).

[Telecolor 3007]

By the way, the name of the guy that invented the SECAM color tv standard was Henry de France.
And also the French and the USSR SECAM standards where differnt.

[Sandy G]

Same w/NTSC. There are several different varieties of it. Everybody's gotta put their own little "tweaks" in, I suppose. I guess in all fairness to ze French, I should mention that PAL was developed largely for the same reasons that SECAM was-European pride & a chance to stick it in Sarnoff's & RCA's eye. PAL is not very different than NTSC, in fact, they were described as being members of the same generic family, Quadrature amplitude modulation. -Sandy G.

[ceebee23]

I do know there are variants of SECAM ....mainly to do with the way the color signal is polarised ..vertically or horizontally or something like that .... I believe...

as for PAL ...well PAL G, I etc ...tend to relate to the band allocation ...and sound offset... but are 625 line 25 frame

But then if I remember rightly is it Brazil that has PAL M....525 line 30 frame with PAL color and Argentina with 625 line NTSC?

eeek the variations are endless .....

[Telecolor 3007]

If you try to put a SECAM signal to a PAL tv you'll get an black & white image.
The funny thing is that in Romanian "se cam" express a doubt.

[ceebee23]

if you do feed a SECAM signal to a PAL standard set you get B/W ....because the luminance signal for the two systems is pretty identical ...625line 50 frame ...the EBU standard agreed in the early 50s....the two systems just have differing colour standards .....

[andy]

---

[wa2ise]

When I was at Samsung doing the KSO127 NTSC/PAL/SECAM demod chip, it could tell PAL from SECAM. We designed a subsystem that measured the frequency of the subcarrier bursts. If 3.58 proceed to the test to tell NTSC 3.58 or PAL at 3.58; or if 4.42 then test for PAL 4.43 or NTSC at 4.43. If not those, and if you get 4.25 and (the other SECAM freq) on alternating lines, then its SECAM. We didn't look at the scan rates for this.

If the device only relies on the horiz and vert scan rates, then it can only tell NTSC from PAL/SECAM. It cant tell PAL from SECAM though.

Some multistandard consumer VCRs can produce a PAL signal at NTSC scan rates, or NTSC at PAL scan rates. Our chip didn't care as it only looked at the subcarrier bursts. So it could decode these non-standard standards.

[ceebee23]

my dvd recorder does a pretty good job of taking a PAL 625/50 input and creating a NTSC 525 /60 ouput....good enough to send friends in the US without problems either on tape or DVD ...extraordinary to think that this would have taken a room of tubes not so long ago! LOL

Came across this great article all about the various systems:
http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/sam/tvfaq.htm#tvcts

I especially liked the following:
"SECAM stands for System Essentially Contrary to the American Method"

(The following is from: Robert Rolf).

SECAM:
Used by France and the former Soviet union.
No tint control. No color control.
Full socialism. The state knows exactly what color you
should see, and how strong that color should be.

PAL:
Used by Germany & UK, Australia etc.
No tint control. A color control.
Partial socialism. The state knows exactly what color you
should see, but you get a choice as to how strong it can be.

NTSC:
Used in USA and Canada, Japan etc.
A tint control, A color control.
Uncontrolled socialism. The state lets you chose what color you
see and how strong it can be. They then tax you regardless.

Anthony