Philips TVC3: 1967 SECAM Colour TV.

What a beauty, I bet it's a two-man lift!  The Philips G6 came in quite a few flavours it seems.

The chassis is very Philips G6-esque.

That's right, and just like the G6 the TVC3 it is dual standard, 819 lines monochrome and 625 lines SECAM colour.

TVC3 is a heavy set.  Was sold in France as the Grundig T1000 as well as the Philips  F25K766.    

Till Eulenspiegel.

Sorry Till, I had edited my post after seeing it was in fact a Philips set.

On page 6, it's displaying some lovely colour pictures.

The LOPTX is very similar in its shape and the mounting with the PD500 as the Ekco dual standard sets.

Like NTSC, PAL and SECAM were all capable of producing good colour pictures under decent reception conditions. PAL seems to win out under less favourable conditions, I have never had the chance to verify that though.

On page 7, a saucy little advert replaces our rather respectable little RS man and adverts for TCC.

Posted by: PYE625

What a beauty, I bet it's a two-man lift!  The Philips G6 came in quite a few flavours it seems.

Is it based on the G6 though, or was it developed in France entirely independently?

I know the G6 is very different from the K6 except for the line-output tower. Oddly enough it uses 100 watts more power than the K6 despite having fewer valves, 480 vs 380.

Posted by: Nuvistor

Like NTSC, PAL and SECAM were all capable of producing good colour pictures under decent reception conditions. PAL seems to win out under less favourable conditions, I have never had the chance to verify that though.

I read at the time SeCAM was better for fringe viewing, being impervious to phase changes and having a narrower chroma bandwidth.

I recall at the time when Europe first started debating the use of a common colour system that Switzerland, in particular, were anti-NTSC on the basis of the phase distortion they expected because of signal reflections in their very mountainous terrain. Whether this was actually valid or not, I don't know. Presumably South Wales would have been in the same situation but as all colour test transmissions were confined to Crystal Palace as far as I know, there was no way of finding out! (By this time, all testing had transferred to the preferred 625-line system for which CP was the only transmitter, anyway!)

Russia was also concerned about using NTSC because of the length of many of the distribution links in the USSR and, no doubt, were influenced by stories of early experiences of countrywide distribution in the US. Then a demonstration was carried out by two mobile teams, one from the BBC and the other from Rank,  who sent pictures over a link from Moscow to Kiev and back. It was said that the Russian engineers, when viewing the before and after results side by side, couldn't tell the difference. 

In retrospect, I feel that this was extremely unlikely and it might have been closer to the truth to say they found it difficult to see the differences but, whatever really happened, the Russians were sold on NTSC.

In the mid-seventies when we were considering adding teletext signals to the Stock Exchange cable TV system, the BBC came along with a hefty box of filters and equalisers - the front panel was packed with controls and switches!

The receivers we were using weren't designed with teletext in mind, of course, and the group delay performance, in particular, was nothing like good enough and that was what they were trying to equalise.  A considerable improvement was obtained but the box was designed to equalise long cable routes and a TV IF strip is hardly in the same category. It was fascinating to watch, nevertheless.

I wonder if that box of tricks worked the Moscow-Kiev miracle? A pity it never occurred to me to ask!

Of course, politics reared its ugly head when President de Gaulle  spotted an opportunity to promote the French SECAM system when it became obvious that it not going to to be used by any other countries in Western Europe after PAL had emerged to quell the doubters.

De Gaulle impressed on the Soviet leaders that they were planning to start a colour tv service using an American system and wouldn't want that, would they? This new PAL system was only a minor modification to the American system, so they wouldn't want that either, would they?

And where were they planning to get their colour tubes from as the only ones available were  American! (True, but the number of tubes used in Europe at the time was very small so no European manufacturer was going into production just yet.)

France was going to produce their own colour tubes and if the Soviets adopted the 100% French SECAM system they would also supply Russia! And so the orders went out and the entire Soviet bloc adopted SECAM ...

I don't know if it is true but there was a story that the French had early production problems and continued to import tubes from the US so it is quite possible that some of the early Russian sets were built with American tubes re-branded to look as if they were made in France!

Posted by: Nuvistor

Like NTSC, PAL and SECAM were all capable of producing good colour pictures under decent reception conditions. PAL seems to win out under less favourable conditions, I have never had the chance to verify that though.

Where PAL scores over NTSC is its ability to correct for phase errors, which it does seamlessly in the background so that there is no need for the NTSC Hue control. Otherwise, from my personal experiences of both while I was at college, there is no discernible difference. 

I never saw SECAM for comparison, which is a pity, although I had plenty of opportunity to watch French TV but always via the Belgian cable networks. One of the selling points of cable in Belgium was that only single standard receivers were required so, in the case of French tv, SECAM was decoded and re-encoded into PAL at the headend for re-transmission.

From Marcel's TV Museum I've picked out the Philips X25K151 multi-norm colour TV set.   Receives PAL or SECAM on 625 lines and also 819 lines France and the narrow bandwidth 819 lines Belgium.  KM1 chassis. Still has that G6 look about it.

http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/photoalbum41.html

I have to mention that I like the look of these continental CTVs.

Till Eulenspiegel.

Radios and TV’s had their different style to U.K. ones, some I liked others I didn’t but at least there was a variety, now they all look similar, especially TV sets.

Going back to Til's first post in this thread, I'm fascinated at how the translate into English function in my browser (Chrome) deals with the same word in different posts!

For example, look at 'la cheminee' in this post:

Je pensais que ca venait du cable blindé de la ventouse a la tourelle, au niveau de l attache metallique sur la cheminee mais ca n a rien changé.

the translation of which is quite reasonable:

I thought it came from the armored cable from the suction cup to the turret, metal fastener on the chimney but nothing changed.

But, in the very next post:

Merci pour le lien, je vais regarder cela aussi, les chassis se ressemble au niveau de la cheminee mais tout le reste est different.

it translates as:

Thank you for the link, I'll look at that too, the chassis is similar to the level of the fireplace but everything else is different.

And look how 'ça pétarade' changes in these two posts:

I

Ça pétarade de façon impressionante comme une mitraillette et sur l'image il se produit de fines rayures horizontales tous les 2 cm

It smashes impressive like a machine gun and on the image there is fine horizontal stripes every 2 cm.

II

Oui jean Luc, c est exact, ça pétarade comme une mitraillette, on croirait que ça vient de la cheminée mais j irais voir a la ventouse .....merci de cette précision.

Yes Jean Luc, it's true, it fart like a machine gun, it seems that it comes from the fireplace but I would go see the sucker ..... thank you for this clarification.

? No comment ...!

Je pensais que ca venait du cable blindé de la ventouse a la tourelle

My French-English dictionary informs us that the feminine word "tourelle" translates as a turret but not always in the sense of a rotating device. Tourelle  used as a word in architecture, military, marine, engineering, aviation = turret.  Engineering lathe: capstan.

Ventouse; see attachments.

Till Eulenspiegel.

Posted by: Terry

I never saw SECAM for comparison, which is a pity, although I had plenty of opportunity to watch French TV but always via the Belgian cable networks. One of the selling points of cable in Belgium was that only single standard receivers were required so, in the case of French tv, SECAM was decoded and re-encoded into PAL at the headend for re-transmission.

French laserdiscs also used PAL exclusively. I read in a French laserdisc magazine that Stanley Kubrick blocked the release of A Clockwork Orange on laserdisc in France even though it was freely available on VHS there on the grounds that while his wife was able to view PAL laserdiscs she was totally unable to view SeCAM VHS tapes. I think by that date most French receivers transcoded SeCAM transmissions to PAL for final viewing and could display either?

The one place in France where PAL featured heavily was in television studios: they were built as PAL and transcoded to SECAM solely for distribution.

This is all quite interesting to read, and given my total lack of French television, save 819 lines VHF monochrome, and precious little of that, everything here is new to me. I knew France adopted SECAM as their colour system, and that Russia used the same. I always thought it odd that France had adopted a Russian system, but now can see how it was more likely the other way round.

It all seems quite sad now that the world has a global system that works where 'ere you go - or does it? I refer to HDMI. Even sadder is that you can walk into a room almost anywhere in the world and the sets that greet you are the same plastic 'picture frame' - totally bland and characterless black (or sometimes silver/grey) plastic hanging (in most cases) on the wall. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.... What a bland flavour life has these days.

Hmm, speaking of 'chimneys/fireplaces' I wonder if the French ever encounter the 'burning Bush' or the self immolating 'hot PYEs'... of '60s British design? ? 

SECAM was also used in Greece - that's the last time I saw it in anger.

Posted by: Katie Bush

 Even sadder is that you can walk into a room almost anywhere in the world and the sets that greet you are the same plastic 'picture frame' - totally bland and characterless black (or sometimes silver/grey) plastic hanging (in most cases) on the wall. 

 

Yes, I agree with that statement, TV’s do look the same, I need to look at the name badge to tell the difference.

Posted by: Katie Bush

This is all quite interesting to read, and given my total lack of French television, save 819 lines VHF monochrome, and precious little of that, everything here is new to me. I knew France adopted SECAM as their colour system, and that Russia used the same. I always thought it odd that France had adopted a Russian system, but now can see how it was more likely the other way round.

Oui, oui, mademoiselle!

SECAM = Séquentiel couleur à mémoire or System Essentially Contrary to the American Method, if you prefer.

I did explain how the entire Soviet bloc came to adopt SECAM very recently, earlier in this thread.