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Working for a UK based company here in the states in the early '90's gave me my first exposure to PAL. One of the companies sales people found out that I did TV work and asked if I serviced British sets . I replied "not yet". He had a Ferguson 13" color portable and a Panasonic muti-standard vcr he used to view soccer game tapes his brother would send him ( the vcr would not output a useable ntsc picture with a pal tape). The Ferguson lacked a/v inputs and had developed an intermittant rf problem. He brought me the set to repair along with an autotransformer and attached UK power stip to power the set and the vcr as a signal source. The only problem in the set turned out to be a poor solder connection (thank goodness - no documentation avail. on this side of the big pond). It surprised me to find a power xfmr in a port. set which made it pretty heavy. I was also surprised to find it would pick up off air local channel 15 but of course no color or sound but good synch! Honestly, the set performed well with the taped programs but with all the normal vhs limitations. I wish I had a pal broadcast signal to judge by. I have always found a tint control to be handy when trying to get a "good" picture on a set with with a marginal crt and gray scale tracking problems. I remember, back in the bad old days (60's -70's), a tint(hue) control could get more work out than the volume knob. This was not only station to station but also program to program (remember the repairman saying "don't go by commercials for adjustment"?). These days it seems like if you have to adjust the hue at all it's a set and forget thing unless one of the guns start to take a dump and you ain't got time or funds to fix it. I saw my first color tv in 1966 and here 39 years later I can say "NTSC, you've come a long ways baby". I kinda happy with it, especially considering the limited amount of viewing time I have. I hedging my bets though. I just picked up a 46" widescreen HDTV for $300!!!! It's a mexican set that they left the crt grounds off of and it looks like I'm still $300 away from HDTV nirvana. It'll still never replace my love for ntsc or my roundies, or my Chromacolors, or my CTC-68's..................
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