My search in the EBU Technical Review for data transfer through the control pin 8 of the SCART connector came to nothing, but Mike Cathodevisor has answered the question indicating that it was proposed to use three pins of the connector, two wires for the data and one for the screening of the the wires.
In the February/April edition an article titled "PALplus and television production for new broadcasting standards" PALplus is discussed and two other proposals, I-PAL "Improved PAL" which was under development in Germany by the Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik (IRT) and from the BBC another compatible improvement of the PAL system called Q-PAL. "Quality PAL" The article goes on to discuss wide aspect ratio. All these new ideas could be reconciled together with PALplus for future high quality TV broadcasting.
Of course all these new ideas to improve the existing PAL system came to nothing with the introduction of digital TV broadcasting.
Nevertheless the 1990s was an interesting decade for TV development. For me the 1980s was the best TV decade.
Till Eulenspiegel.
"improvements" is an interesting topics. Less was done in the USA to analog, basically just adding stereo sound in the obvious way. Our system really never needed any changes. Another subject is "disimprovements". Here there never was one to analog. Of course, the has been here a stupendous disimprovement. Our "high" period was about 1995 to 2013. We had receivers with internal digital to make comb filters and, because of that, go back to I-Q demodulation and response all the way out to 4.2 MHz. Results are excellent.
Then the great disaster happened: digital. This has resulted in an extreme drop in image quality. Other than Blu-ray there is no source of high technical quality program material. Every available digital source, including over-the-air and cable and streaming uses, in extreme forms, the ability to cut quality to cut bitrate. For example, detail in low light areas has been reduced to blocks of 8x8 pixels refreshed say 4 times per second. Moving objects disappear into sludge of random pixels. Areas with fine low intensity detail become like paste makup on a face. Etc. ad infinitum et nauseum.
I do not exaggerate: there is now NO high quality program source other than BluRay. Well, I guess there is home video. My attemps at that have been stunningly excellent technically, if extremely boring (like 5 minutes of me recapping a radio, or birds serenading
each other.)
Doug McDonald
I seem to remember Channel 4 transmitting PAL Plus ... or is it a false memory?
My Philips / Fluke pattern generator can generate PAL Plus, there are odd patterns specifically for this, I don't know if any UK TV sets were marketed with PAL plus, although I'm sure newer models had the facility in the decoder chip set.
Nokia marketed a few PALplus TV sets in the UK. During a Channel Four PALplus transmission it was possible to see some faint activity in the blanked off lines in the letterbox picture display.
Till Eulenspiegel.
@till I was going to say Goldstar, but you're right, it was Nokia. We were a Nokia dealer at the time (as well as LG, Hitachi, Sanyo etc etc)
something to do with "helper codes" being transmitted I think
@doz Yes I remember the "helper" signals which were all analogue, my generator has a PM5544 16:9 Pal plus test card in a 4:3 raster, in the black bars there are low amplitude chroma blocks. I've never seen the full spec.of PAL Plus, before this the BBC had a go at E-PAL (or PAL-E) Enhanced or extended ? I think it was 16:9 with some ghost cancellation signals (like multiburst) I don't think it was ever used.
On the other hand in the late eighties I remember seeing C-MAC pictures from the Marco-Polo satellite on a professional monitor and the pictures were really clear and sharp with very vivid colours, then later D2-MAC pictures from Norway they weren't as good but it was a domestic TV and I don't know how they encoded MAC, it may have been converted from PAL composite. I wonder if any MAC test equipment or receivers still exist ? I think MAC was abandoned by the late nineties.
According to my calculations when a 16:9 display was transmitted and reproduced on a 4:3 screen the number of active lines is reduced from 576 to only 432 lines. The 14:9 image transmitted up to the end of analogue TV was a better compromise having 493 active lines.
Till Eulenspiegel.
Worse still, the vertical resolution was diminished as there were still only 702/720 pixels in an active line....
