My 1978 Sony 18" had a "Picture" slider control that adjusted the brightness, contrast and colour contrast together. Useful to adjust to suit different room lighting. Behind a panel at the front there were additional colour contrast and either brightness or contrast buttons. And a tone control (treble cut).
There were also controls at the back - I think you had to insert a screwdriver through holes - one was "Height" which I had to adjust to show the whole picture from my BBC Micro.
Yes, the PAL (either colour or plain 625/25 monochrome) outputs from a lot of computers were a bit borderline-compliant. I had a Wren CP/M computer in the early 80s and that had 625/25 RGB output, rather than the more normal US-standard 640x480 in 525/30 format. The waveform was evidently a bit borderline (if you connected one of the three colours to a TV's composite video input) because the TV picture would roll briefly and suffered a bit of tearing near the bottom of the picture. The waveform looked OK on an oscilloscope: it had line sync etc included with each colour, as well as having a separate sync pin, but evidently the timing was slightly out.
I made a PAL converter using a 4.43 MHz crystal and an RGB-to-PAL IC, and this produced better results as regards sync - no rolling or tearing - so maybe the presence of the PAL colour burst and clamping of sync, black and white levels improved things. But although TVs could display the signal fine, VHS VCRs couldn't lock and the head servo and tape-transport motor made some alarming noises as they had a jolly good try!
The Sinclair ZX80 produced a good (though monochrome) signal from its RF modulator: that would display and record fine.
Sorry, but if the computer produced 3 component colours it wasn't producing PAL. That is a composite system.
My first colour set, a Philips, had the convergence pots on a panel above the channel selector on the front. Well away from the nasty voltages round a tube.
My laptop takes 18 seconds for win10. Not bad when some of the stuff is still on spinning rust. Its not a top of the line one and its running in power saving mode all the time so its probably quicker if I run at full power.
I think mine is in the BIOS for a bit longer than that, about 7 seconds.
You have to do a restart and power down once the BIOS is there to stop the win10 quick start to get a true time from power to boot as above. Just letting it "shutdown" brings it up in about 3 seconds.
Hybrid sleep is hibernation except it stay suspended for a while so it doesn't need to reload from disk if you use it again after a short time. Its safer than suspend as if the battery goes flat nothing is lost.
Think this was the Sony, a KV1810
The Bush was very similar to this (I recognise the tuner and the AFC switch) I seem to recall they did both 22 inch and 26 inch models
Quite a bit of the B&O range was little more than Philips evaluation circuitry for their various TV/radio/hifi building blocks integrated together and stuck in a posh box. But Philips tended to design relatively good kit albeit with some really whacky variations on almost identical modular TV boards for no apparent reason.
Had a VCR relatively early on but never connected a VCR to an amp and speakers until much much later, maybe around the time of S-VHS. The real improvement was with NICAM though. I can't recall exactly when NICAM came along (very early
90's?) but Sony did a mod kit for their TV's with a replacement IF board and a handful of interconnects and mounting hardware. Cost maybe about 80 quid. The TV is long gone but the bits removed for that upgrade are still in a box in the loft along with the instructions.625 line PAL VCRs recorded 405 line material happily enough. They didn't give a damn what was in the signal as long as the frame pulses were the right time apart.
NT
The big disadvantage with playing a non-NICAM VHS machine through a good amplifier is that non-NICAM VCRs are usually those which don't have hifi (FM) sound on the tape either, so the enhanced treble response of the hifi amplifier magnifies the tape hiss from a very narrow track and the slow speed (1.3 ips for SP, half of that for LP and quarter of it for EP).
NICAM really was the dog's bollocks. Damn good reproduction compared with MPEG-2 at 256 or 192 kbps which is still good but can sound slightly raspy.
I have fond memories of a VHS tape getting creased and depositing oxide on the spinning heads. A bit of iso-propyl alcohol on a cotton wool bud, dabbed on the heads, usually solved this when it happened, but on this occasion I got the picture back but there was no hifi soundtrack detected so the VCR fell back to linear, with all the hiss that this entailed. It took a long time and several applications of alcohol, both on a bud and on a cloth cleaning tape, to get the sound working again. After that, I learned my lesson: if a tape appeared to have jammed, pull the power immediately (to prevent the auto-unthreading from making matters worse), remove the lid, and pull the tape-jam apart while trying to keep it clear of the drum (or at least, where the heads were on the drum). Don't try to extract the cassette (even gently) through the normal slot.
There was no lasting damage to the VCR: it still played existing recordings and made/played new recordings right up until 2007 when I began using Windows Media Centre and a USB DVB-T decoder to record everything. I felt slightly miffed because a few years before I retired it, it developed an unrelated fault in the tape-transport logic and began shuttling the tape from spool to spool at high speed (though not full FF/REW speed) as soon as you put the cassette in. I took it to a shop who said it was unrepairable and gave me a choice: either pay for their time in investigating or give them the machine for spares. Luckily I chose the first option. I went out and bought a replacement, and then a few months later tried the old one again and it worked perfectly - and continued right up till retirement. I consoled myself that with two VHS machines I could copy programmes from one tape to another for archiving and could record two different programmes simultaneously.
Yes, I've heard this. The only thing that matters is the spacing of the frame sync pulses; the number of line sync pulses (i number of lines) doesn't matter.
The difficulty is getting access to a 405-line signal. The tuner in all UK VHS recorders was UHF/625-line only, so you'd need a VHF/405-line tuner that could output baseband video and a modulator to convert the off-tape signal back to a form that the TV could play. And you'd need to do it before broadcasters stopped broadcasting 405-line in the mid 1980s.
Nowadays there are a few hobbyists who have developed modified PCs which produce standards-compliant 405/25 video by driving the graphics card in a special mode, and so they could play any video file (off-air MPEG, Youtube). You could even convert from DVB-T2 1920x1080 high-definition to 405-line!
As you say, that 450-line signal could be recorded and played back on VHS.
Then you need a modulator or else a modified TV which allows you to inject baseband video.
As an aside, I wonder what your average 625/25 telly would make of a 405/25 signal (assuming you got past the different modulators and fed baseband). The frame would sync perfectly but the lines would be all scrambled. Is 625 divided by 405 a simple enough relationship that you'd see a static pattern of lines, I wonder?
It always amazed me that modern European tellies and VCRs can usually copy with NTSC tapes and signals: I have played a US VHS tape in my player and got a stable picture (reduced height, corrupted colour due to alternate lines not having the required phase reversal) - usually accompanied by a loud clonk as a relay in my telly switches in a different frame-sync circuit.
The converse is not true: much less US kit can play PAL tapes and signals - presumably because of The World Ends At The US Borders syndrome :-)
Heh, call it an OOPS draw...
It's been adapted to take current coinage.
SteveW
Well BT didn't use their knowledge well, as people were making such calls without the operators catching on from what I remember
SteveW
no-one broadcasts 405 so not much point. It was similarly pointless pre-82 for different reasons.
Easier to inject the baseband signal into the tv after the tuner. That's what I did, not a live chassis set. If it is I won't mumble anything about neutrals & RCDs.
no mod needed on mine. I don't know if tuner output levels & polarity were standardised though.
total scramble. I tried getting a B&W to slow down to 405 and it just would not pull down far enough no matter what I did. If you look at old 405/625 dual standard sets they had massive slide switches to switch a long list of circuit operations.
ISTR that with the right line speed adjustment I got an image that was clearly mathematically related and lined up every several lines. So I could see roughly what was on the reording, but it wasn't watchable.
30 line TV is fun too - very different.NT
Interesting. Most early VCRs didn't have a line in. Or a VHF tuner. And can't say I've ever seen a 405 line set with a line out either.
You do realise it was 11 bit companded? CD being 16 bit?
Let's see if you can work it out.
NT
It wasn't BT's problem, they just billed the calls to the line renter. The renter could have incoming calls blocked if it was a problem.
I don't think MPEG-2 was even an audio standard. It was MPEG layer 3 that was the audio standard and that was abbreviated to MP3 so you can guess how poor that sounded.
11 bit companded is likely to sound better than MP3 but not CD.
Yes I was comparing NICAM to MPEG Layer 2, as used by SD broadcasts. The fact that NICAM was 14 bit with only the most significant 11 bits being transmitted - so for loud sounds that was the most significant 11 bits, for quiet sounds where the top three bits were zero, they transmitted the least significant bits, and there were a few intermediate stages; the same gain setting was used for a block of several (32?) samples. IIRC no compression was used so effectively it was like a CD but with only 11 instead of 16 bits.
I'm not sure what the situation is with MPEG. Do they use the full dynamic range of 16 bits? The compression used by MPEG is the problem, because you don't get back what you put in, only an approximation which varies from atrocious to indistinguishable from the original using a British Standard ear.
I cannot distinguish MPEG from CD for 256 kbps and above. 160 kbps is usually good enough not to notice artefacts, except on sounds with a lot of high frequencies (cymbals, applause). Any less than 128 and the artefacts become intrusive. 64 kbps mono, as used by some commercial radio stations on Freeview, sounds baaaaad.
I realise that TV sound is MPEG Layer 2 whereas the compression used for downloadable music etc is MPEG Layer 3, usually abbreviated to MP3.
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