"Old TVs Create Toxic Problem"

[RCAZenith]

Originally Posted by Robert Grant

I think it would have been hard to upgrade NTSC to a significant degree while at the same time making the improved system backwards-compatible. They did try, and at least one 960ii system was tested (I think I may have seen a brief test of such a system on a Saturday morning circa 1985. For just a few minutes, a cartoon on ABC looked a little funny. They went to an ad break, in which the live action looked "a little jerky". Then, the "back to the program" bit on ABC involved an animation of a clock with a mechanical alarm ringing - and the effect was very obvious - the clock had two hammers! They switched back to normal-looking video about ten seconds after returning to the cartoon).

The real failure was in waiting FAR too late to invoke the all-channel act. If sets from 1991 onwards had ATSC tuners, most sets in use would have already been digital-ready by the time of the analog shutdown.

Any recording of this? That would be interesting to see.