Good Day NowhereMan 1966,
Thanks! for your post. You wrote:
"I would have loved to see the 819 line standard, it is really high definition".
Well, yes and no: i remember seing 875-900 test pattern black/white bars resolved with clear separation on my Grandma's TV in 1959. The French 819 channel (see table below) had a 10.00 MHz video bandwith allocation, but the 4" then 3.5" Image Orthicon camera tubes were not capable of fully using the available bandwith. Also wide video bandwith was(is) expensive to attain in consumer TVs, so only the best really did justice to the system. Still, a live camera picture showing 819 in the late 50s was quite a jaw-dropping experience when compared to 405 (UK) & 441 (vintage French).
"I've heard they experimented with color in 819 and IIRC, I think that color system was used for medical schools in their teaching due to the high definition picture but that's what I heard 20 years ago".
To my knowledge, Nope! Sorry! Urban Legend.
What was used, was a 625 derivation of CBS field-Sequential indeed sold for CCTV filming of operations to med students in hospitals.
The Paris Science Museum "The Palace of Discovery" had a color TV demo display showing a field sequential Thomson Vidicon camera on 3 modified RCA 21" monitors + a vertically-mounted 21" RCA color tube showing the various components. The demo ran from 1961-1968. Color TV started here in Oct 1967.
Recently (2 years ago) myself and a friend had to privilege to visit the Museum's storage warehouse and took pictures of a complete 1948 CBS system including a color camera + a big + small monitor. This is the last remaining complete CBS system at a single site.
see my pictures here on the ETF site:
http://www.earlytelevision.org/cnam.html
"I know it use a lot of bandwidth but the 819 line picture must have been awesome to look at".
RF Channel total width was 14.00 MHz of which 10.00 MHz dedicated to video.
"I'm glad at least we have converters to keep our old TV's running for our ATSC standard and your DVB standard. One, I'm too poor to get a new TV, I'm looking for more steady work so the 1982 Zenith model that we've been using for over 25 years will have to do."
Keep it running! it's better than all the Chinese junk!
"Over here in the U.S., on this board, someone said they ran a ATSC digital converter on an old 441 line system (we briefly used 441 lines before our NTSC 525 line standard) set and it does work. I know on my old black and white Sony, the picture is very crisp when I know they are sending an HDTV picture down the pike, usually NBC shows the Olympic trials in high def. I know it isn't true high def, but still, you can see the better picture quality."
I worked 25 years in Broadcast TV. I saw the first 1125/60 analogue pictures at NAB in 1985, then later at a customer's in Paris: TV pioneer David Niles. The pictures were jaw-dropping awesome on a 27" Sony 300 lb, 50K$ CRT Trinitron monitor.
You could clearly see the fuzz on the upper lip of a blonde female anchorwoman, filmed 10 feet away.
Sorry to say, 1080/i/p is nice but no match for what i saw 23 years ago. I suspect that the camera-fresh signal is OK but that the transmission compression imposed for economic reasons just ruins the signal, what a shame !
Just my 2 cents...
HD in Europe:
Over here, we have DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial) a pan-European union Digital MPEG-2 625/50 color system. The next step, starting in oct here will be HD DVB-T using MPEG-4 compression, i.e. same RF bandwith, but HD.
DVB-S (satellite) is already up & running. UK Sat TV behemoth Sky-TV (8 million subscribers in the UK alone) already has 12 full HD channels running 24/7. What's nice here is that HD channels are full HD 1080i all the time, no "variable geometry" depending on the content (show, movie, sports,advertising, ...)
Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France