Down Under TVs

[Carmine]

Just saw this on ebay, and thought it was cool.



http://cgi.ebay.com/ASTOR-TELEVISION...QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/THORN-ATLAS-TELE...QQcmdZViewItem

[dr.ido]

I have a similar 23" Astor Princess set here which is from 1962. The set in this does look earlier, but I don't think it's from 1956 (the year that TV started in Australia).

It's been a long time since I've seen others to compare, but from memory they were better made than the Pye and Thorn. I seem to remember Astor sticking with point to point wiring after Pye and Thorn had switched to PCBs.

I think Astor was gone by the time we color in 1975, at least I've never seen an Astor color set.

[daro]

Astor was brought out by Philips in around 1974 just before colour stated, PYE was also consumed by Philips in around 1978 as the last of the PYE's had used Philips chassis. Thorn was brought by AWA to become AWA Thorn, Remember the TCE 4000 chassis & TCE 3504 chassis used in some early AWA & Thorn colour television just before they switched to useing Mitsubishi chassis's which were more reliable then TCE chasis's that they were using at the time.

[Sandy G]

Why did it take so long for you fellers to get color? Was it the size of the market, gov't ineptitude, or did color sets not want to work Down Under?

[Carmine]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Why did it take so long for you fellers to get color? Was it the size of the market, gov't ineptitude, or did color sets not want to work Down Under?

You don't know much about Australian history do ya mate? Prior to building the Outback Fence in 1974, Australian progress was slowed down by bands of wild kangaroos, which would go into test labs and kick over prototype roundies with their strong feet. Heck, everybody knows that the Valiant Charger R/T was created just so Australian citizens could flee the crazed 'roo attacks!



After the "great fence" was finished, Australian society entered a golden age, not only perfecting Coluor TV, but inventing things like gigantic cans of beer...



music...



food..



women...



And finally, this obnoxious fool...







No charge for the history lesson Sandy

[Sandy G]

Dammitt, Carmine- I was outta Windex 'n' paper towels to clean the monitor off when I spit supper all over it when that Perfesser Irwin showed up...he's a Bee-Yoo-Tee...<grin>

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by Carmine

You don't know much about Australian history do ya mate? Prior to building the Outback Fence in 1974, Australian progress was slowed down by bands of wild kangaroos, which would go into test labs and kick over prototype roundies with their strong feet. Heck, everybody knows that the Valiant Charger R/T was created just so Australian citizens could flee the crazed 'roo attacks!



No charge for the history lesson Sandy

PHOOEY on the Valiant Charger... Give me that Hilux double cab Diesel Toyota in the background !!!!!!

Charles

[dr.ido]

I don't know exactly what the story is behind Australia getting color, but considering we got B&W in 56, 75 for color doesn't seem that late. My guess without actually looking anything up is that we were following England, but then they got color in what? 67? I don't know if an NTSC system was ever tried here.

I know that some of the earliest color sets here were essentially English sets with VHF tuners. Those hybrid Decca sets are almost the only color sets I've seen here with tubes in them. They used tubes in the horizontal output and possibly in the vertical section (it's been a long long time since I've seen one). I say almost as I've seen at least one set brought over from England that had been fitted with a tube VHF tuner salvaged from a B&W set.

At any rate I'm glad we went with PAL. I've seen both and while NTSC can look good I prefer PAL. It just seems to do some things better. I haven't really looked into why, but while NTSC from Laserdisc or DVD can look very good (I've haven't seen over the air NTSC) NTSC from VHS or a game console looks noticably worse than PAL (though wherever possible I use RGB).

Maybe if things worked out differently we could have ended up with the worst of all worlds, 405 line, 50Hz, NTSC.

[Sandy G]

Yeah, well, I guess the question should be why was TV so late in coming to Oz in the 1st place ? I can see 1956 in some 3rd world shithole, or Lower Albania, but Australia suffered from neither of these afflictions. You guys were & are, a large, modern prosperous nation, a member of the Western alliance & the British Commonwealth. Just doesn't make sense...

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Yeah, well, I guess the question should be why was TV so late in coming to Oz in the 1st place ? I can see 1956 in some 3rd world shithole, or Lower Albania, but Australia suffered from neither of these afflictions. You guys were & are, a large, modern prosperous nation, a member of the Western alliance & the British Commonwealth. Just doesn't make sense...

Maybe it was a culture thing? I can remember when I was little, in the 70s, a very negative sentiment among the stuffy society crowd regarding TV. Some people thought that TV would bring the country to ruin, and to have a TV set installed in your livingroom was on an etiquette par with farting in church. If you had one, it was to be hidden or disguised so that dignified guests would be unaware you had one. (hence all those sets with doors, and ones that looked like coffee tables, etc)... Or better yet, the TV was put in a spare room in the back of the house. Times sure changed! Now they say you're nobody unless you have a 60" HDTV flat screen in the livingroom; to blast away disruptively at max volume when you have guests trying to visit.

After all, I have yet to meet a rude Australian !

Charles

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Kaye-Halbert TV

I can remember when I was little, in the 70s, a very negative sentiment among the stuffy society crowd regarding TV.
Charles

[Straight line alert!]
You were in the stuffy society crowd? What happened?

Hey - maybe they wouldn't have hidden their TVs if they had PAL.

[kx250rider]

Ho-Ho-Ho... It was actually more like me on the outside looking in... Indeed my family didn't have a TV in the livingroom, but for us it was that we couldn't afford one. By the time I was born, the family finally had a GE 21" console that my Grandma won in a raffle at the Vernon Market in South Central LA... Then in '72, my mother bought a 12" Hitachi color set at Fedco.

Charles

[dtuomi]

Originally Posted by dr.ido

I don't know exactly what the story is behind Australia getting color, but considering we got B&W in 56, 75 for color doesn't seem that late. My guess without actually looking anything up is that we were following England, but then they got color in what? 67? I don't know if an NTSC system was ever tried here.

I know that some of the earliest color sets here were essentially English sets with VHF tuners. Those hybrid Decca sets are almost the only color sets I've seen here with tubes in them. They used tubes in the horizontal output and possibly in the vertical section (it's been a long long time since I've seen one). I say almost as I've seen at least one set brought over from England that had been fitted with a tube VHF tuner salvaged from a B&W set.

At any rate I'm glad we went with PAL. I've seen both and while NTSC can look good I prefer PAL. It just seems to do some things better. I haven't really looked into why, but while NTSC from Laserdisc or DVD can look very good (I've haven't seen over the air NTSC) NTSC from VHS or a game console looks noticably worse than PAL (though wherever possible I use RGB).

Maybe if things worked out differently we could have ended up with the worst of all worlds, 405 line, 50Hz, NTSC.

I think I once read somewhere where there was an Austrailian commission set up for the uses of television. It was something along the lines of a big event would spur them on to do something with TV. For example I think the opening of the television service in the 50's was spurred on by the hosting of the Olympics. I'm not sure about color though.

PAL can give a wider gamut than NTSC (more colors) mostly because most European implimentations give a little more bandwidth to the signal, I'm not sure how wide the channels are in Austrailia, so that may or may not be the case.

NTSC generally looks better on an NTSC set though. I've seen NTSC on multi-standard and PAL sets that can playback the pseudo-NTSC pictures that are generated by some VCR's and it doesn't look like it should. The blacks are very crushed and the colors tend to be washed out. The reason is that the NTSC and PAL color gamuts don't line up perfectly. So what is reproduced as one color on NTSC would then be reproduced differently on PAL. Also American NTSC uses a 7.5 IRE level for its blacks. PAL uses 0 IRE. The end result is that your blacks (and whites) don't line up either. If its any consolation PAL pictures look rather overprocessed when you see them on an NTSC set.

The reasoning for PAL was to make terestrial broadcasting more reliable. In the end, most people in the States use cable which sort of moots the PAL advantage since the signal is closed sent via closed circuit RF.

All that being said I've seen bad and good pictures on both systems. As far as what you could get that would be worse, I'd say that would have been 405 line with SECAM color. SECAM (as the French use it) has half the color resolution of either NTSC or PAL and uses AM sound (because they use FM to transmit the color carriers). SECAM was also developed to solve the phase problems with terestrial broadcasting, but ended up introducing new ones of its own.

Oh well, we're all using the best television standards the 1930's could supply.

David

[wa2ise]

PAL to me has large area flicker, the screen refresh rate being 50Hz is quite visible to my eyes. 60Hz (NTSC) isn't anywhere near as bad. Though I found that I have to set my VGA computer monitor displays to 75Hz to avoid large area flicker. From what I understand, the brightness of the display makes flicker worse, for a given refresh rate. Back in the day when color CRTs were not at all bright (you'd have to draw the shades on the windows during the day to watch the soap operas) 50Hz refresh may not have flickered.

Heard that some fancy modern sets use field store memories so the screen can be refreshed at 100Hz rate to get rid of the large area flicker on bright displays

[Sandy G]

Never fear, y'all...HDTV, w/ONE world standard will be here in 1980...1985...1990...1995...2000...2005...2009..An ' this time I MEAN it, dammit !!