GERMANY: The Battle For Colour Television | An AMTV Documentary
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- čas přidán 10. 08. 2023
- The Battle For Colour IS ON!
It's the 1960s, and GERMANY, divided into East & West after World War II is beginning to rebuild and redevelop. In the world of television, technicians and engineers on both sides are hard at work at trying to get COLOUR TELEVISION to their eager audiences. Who would get there first? Who was involved and what factors were at play? Find out this fascinating story in the latest AMTV Documentary!
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It's a beautiful doc!
That's very true. In the 1980s PAL televisions sold near the iron curtain had a SECAM-East module in Germany, and sets sold in the southwest near the french border one for Secam-West.
Also interesting, back then I owned a Commodore computer monitor with a VCR as tuner that certainly did only PAL. In December 1989, DFF2 all of a sudden appeared in color. I was baffled, because the east german television was seriously RACING to rename themselves from DDR television back to DFF AND even to change to PAL-To the best of my knowledge, without much of a heads-up on the TV standard change. It was also a turbo attempt to get rid of all the socialism from their programming. Even the infamous propaganda show "Der schwarze Kanal" had to go, with a last measly 5 minutes for famous last words.
I have to seriously wonder how they could manage the changeover so quickly. Televisions made by RFT in the GDR had PAL built in, so set-wise not an issue. But what about the studio and broadcast equipment?
@@amurtigress_mobile365 There is no difference between eastern and french Secam decoder. But the B/W TV standard was different. So the Secam module was still the same, but sound demodulator, and signal polarity had to be changed to receive french broadcast.
Secam due to FM modulation for chrominance is problematic for studio work. So PAL was often used in studios and than transcoded to Secam (there are other methods possible, for example soviets used Y + modified C channel processing).
Outstanding Doc ! Thank you
You can't say the dictator because you hated him
My father wanted a color TV so much, but he was earning DM 750 per month at the end of the 1970s and a new color TV cost DM 2000. He knew a radio technician who sold used TVs cheaply and until 1999 this radio technician supplied us with used, refurbished TVs. And only one TV caught fire and was thrown into the garden 😂
But we he didn't take a loan?
@@Telecolor-in3cl Because that's very un-German
@@thatredkite8310 Why so?
@@Telecolor-in3cl We don't like debt
@@thatredkite8310 But no one in Germany makes loans for cars for example?
According to my engineer friends:
NTSC =
Never The Same Color (twice)
SECAM =
System Essentially Counter to American Method
PAL =
(but) People *Are* Lavender!
I once connected an NTSC Colorbargenerator (Canopus ADVC-100) to my Panasonic tube television via a 1m long cable. So NTCS (next to color source) works.
PAL was also called Pay (for) Additional Luxury
@@pirazel7858 Or Pay And Look
NTSC = Not That Shitty Colour
@@pirazel7858Or Pay Another License, because the BBC wanted extra money to pay for colour broadcasts.
It is so sad to see innovative firms such as Telefunken and Grundig disappear in Germany, as well as manufacturers such as RCA in the States. We have lost our technological leadership in the majority of consumer electronics.
To be fair, Apple is still a big player in the Consumer Electronics Market. When it comes to Television however, the Japanese, Koreans & Chinese still rule the roost.
Now it's 'da dwuetoof device is weddy to pear'
Can't say much of Telefunken and Grundig, but RCA had it coming to them.
The separation between the Research and Product Development arms of RCA basically made it near impossible to create new products or follow new trends. From the Boycott of Product Development of internally developed Transistors, to the creation of products from futuristic and impractical concepts such as the Holotape Player.
This culminated in the decades spanning development and release of the RCA Selectivision CED. While the device itself wasn't the direct reason the corporation sunk, it was a factor and a symptom of what was wrong inside of the organization.
@@MatthewCobalt It seems that quite a few US companies with research divisions (including the likes of Xerox) didn't do as much as they should have to get things out of the lab and onto the market.
@@MatthewCobalt Telefunken was esentially the german counterpart of the RCA. Both ended up under control of Thomson. Grundig almost went bankrupt in 1982, then Philips bailed them out. None of these companies exist anymore as consumer electronics manufacturers.
For 20 years Berlin was the only city in the world where broadcasts with all 3 color systems were found - the West German civilian and British forces channels used PAL, the Eastern and French forces channels used SECAM and the American forces channel used NTSC.
Did any of the Western armies have TVs with all 3 systems available in colour?
@@anonUK You could buy 3-system TVs, in college I dated an Army brat whose family had just returned from Germany and had one. That reminds me, for "only city in the world" I should correct myself to "only major world city" since they were in the Rhineland and could pick up regular French TV along with German and AFRS.
@@anonUK The TV sets with capability for three signals were rare in the 1970s and 1980s and very expensive. My father's friend lived very close to the US military base in Karlsruhe, and he was able to receive the NTSC signal with a second-hand TV set that he bought from one of the Army buddies. That's how he and his wife and daughters improved their English fluency so fast in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The friends of his daughters often visited his home just to watch the US television programmes.
@@InTeCredo That's why I thought the tech might have been restricted to Army/ Intelligence facilities.
Is he from SW Germany originally? Did he get French TV- or ever try?
Even in the US, it wasn't uncommon for middle class families to still have one or two black and white TV's in the 80's, for secondary or tertiary use. The main "family' tv would be a color tv, but the kitchen, garage, workshop or other less important area may have had a B/W model. Also, well through the 70's and well into the 80's, there was still a lot of B/W shows in syndication being rebroadcast.
And in sunny california, we got color TV in .... 1983. We all had to go to Grandma's house to see anything in color.
She had this ENORMOUS console TV that we inherited ... had that until the mid-90s I think.
When the PAL system was introduced in W-Germany, Walter Bruch was asked on TV by presenter Hans Rosenthal (very famous back then) why he named the system PAL. Bruch answered with the question, what he would have asked if he named the system Bruch-System to the amusement of the audience.
»Bruch« in German can be translated in to English as break, crack, failure, fracture, break, etc.
The Broke System (as in broken, not gone bust).
@@anonUK If it ain't Bruch, doan' fixen it! 😜
09:20 East Germany had adopted the West German audio carrier 5.5MHz (B/G) back in the early 1950s, as opposed to the rest of the Eastern block countries who used 6.0MHz (D/K). This was done to ensure mutual compatibility between East and West Germany, and it allowed viewers on both sides to watch each other's broadcasts all through the cold war era.
When colour was introduced in the 1960s, politics had changed, and compatibility with West Germany wasn't a goal of the East German government any more, so they opted for SECAM like the rest of the Eastern block. However, thanks to the earlier decision, basic compatibility remained assured and people could continue to watch each other's tv, if in black and white only.
This basic compatibility decided in the 50s also eased the switch of the East German transmitters to PAL shortly after reunification.
Are you sure about D and K using 6 MHz sound separation? I thought we in UK (OK, and Eire and Hong Kong), with our system I, were the only ones on 6, with the rest of Europe on 5.5 (and some parts of the world on 6.5 - not sure which).
When UK forces TV was set up (must have cost an absolute fortune!) with a set of transmitters for the part of (west, obviously!) Germany where the British were still, _that_ used a 6 separation (I think partly for licencing reasons of the providing companies - BBC and ITV); among the local richer Germans, there was a good trade in converter boxes.
@@G6JPG Sorry no, you're right. I mistyped in the heat of the moment. D/K is indeed 6.5MHz audio. Thanks for the correction.
I was born in east germany and we got our first Colour TV set in early 1989 for ca. 5000 Mark. I still remember the day it arrived. Back then i didn't know anything about broadcast standards but that changed right around the time of re-unification of East and West Germany and the shut down of East German programs DFF1 and DFF2. We got our first VHS recorder in 1990 and used it a lot from the beginning to not only playback bought movies but also record a lot on TV. East and west program. However a few years later, in 1994 or 95 , when we got a new Grundig colour TV set, we realized that some of our VHS recordings were suddenly only black and white. And those were the ones we recorded on the Still broadcasting east german TV stations. This was when my father explained to me that GDR television was SECAM and now we had PAL. We could watch west german TV on our old east german colour TV set without problems though since east german Colour TV sets were both able to handle the colour coding for PAL and SECAM, since the majority of these TVs were meant to go into the export market. So they HAD to be able to handle PAL as well.
Great documentary as always. Just on a somewhat pedantic point, I have numerous UK TV reference books from the 1960s and 70s, mostly BBC and ITA/IBA (some of which are now downloadable) , which all refer to PAL as standing for Phase Alternation Line. It seems that in the years since, people have taken it upon themselves to replace 'alternation' with 'alternating' or 'alternate' purely for grammatical reasons, with these alternatives (no pun intended) now accepted as definitive. Nevertheless, I still refer to PAL as Phase Alternation Line on the basis of it coming from the 'horses mouth' so to speak. A trivial point perhaps, but worthy of mention hopefully.
I don't know how common it actually was but in the West, they also had dual systems in the 70s/80s. My dad who grew up in the West always likes to tell the story of my grandad being against watching East German TV. One day they supposedly aired a Bud Spencer movie and he only noticed when they used a different dub than West Germany.
In this case the dub was closer to the original, the West German dubs tried to add some humor, changes lines, adds talking to silent passages.
There is an Italian film, where Adriano Celentano plays the farmer Elias, who has no manners. He has a young woman as guest, who claimed having a damaged foot and want to test it. So he ride with the bike to another farmer, who has a cold, walks over his bed to the window. He left the door open and the farmer with the cold said "The door, the shoes, the window" and when Elias left, the same words in other order.
The West German dubbing let the man with the cold talking many many words, so it looks not believable, when this man remains silent.
In the 1970s dual standard sets would mostly be sold in close border areas only, especially West Berlin obviously. In the 1980s the main tv manufacturers would make all their televisions and VCRs for the West German market PAL/SECAM compatible. For example Panasonic VCRs of the era are recognizable by the suffix "EG" to their model number. This meant it's a variant for the German market (regarding mains voltage, plug, channel allocations), but amongst other things also that it was both PAL and MESECAM compatible.
@@robfriedrich2822very good! Your grand father was very clever.
5:15 The French system SECAM was an independent development done in parallel to PAL by Henri De France to improve NTSC. It worked by separating the two colour difference signals transmitting V signals on one line and U on the next line, and using a delay line to recombine them. The idea being that if the colour could be fuzzy ( compared with the luminance/black and white signal) horizontally it could also be fuzzy vertically as well.
Indeed, in many ways SÉCAM was superior... except SÉCAM-L......
System Essentially Contrary to American Method
I completely forgot SECAM was a thing.
@@puntme … then Peace At Last. (Starting with Never Twice Same Colour - though the main cause of that was less the case on UHF.)
PAL and SECAM took NTSC's basic idea of encoding low resolution color with a subcarrier and used expensive delay lines to improve it. There was already one delay line in NTSC receivers (the color signal was slightly behind the luminescence signal) so requiring an even larger one was out of the question in the early 50s.
Such a wonderful time, so much innovation happening in the world of television. So sad how it all went down the pan..
The 2nd NTSC was introduced in 1951 to develop a compatible colour standard. The first evolution in 1952 was Colour Phase Alternation to cancel hue errors. Both PAF (Phase Alternate Field) and Phase Alternate Line (PAL) was extensively tested in the US in 1952. The Colour Phase Alternation was abandoned in late 1952 when the format which is currently known as NTSC colour was tested beginning January 1953 and adopted December 17, 1953.
PAL development lingered until Walter Bruch took it up. He had the benefit of a cost effect glass line delay which made practical a cost effective chroma averaging to eliminate what the Germans called "Hannover Bars" which was the main stumbling block which prevented the NTSC implementation of PAL much earlier.
I wonder if, even with a suitable delay line (NTSC sets do have one, but it’s a very short delay l), if the NTSC color standard would have been what PAL was. At the time NTSC was finalized, the receiver technology was still very complex. Adding the phase flip and all would have added even more tubes to the early sets.
In fact, it took RCA 5 tries before they settled onto what became the basis for modern NTSC sets. Even then, the CTC-7 suffered from paper wax capacitors and other unstable components.
Once you had cheap transistors, and stable components, PAL was easier to implement. I don’t think many all-tube PAL sets were made.
@@philipnasadowski1060 The I Q demodulator included a second short delay only the align wideband I demodulation with the narrow band Q. From the CTC5, equal narrow bandwidth quadrature demodulation was used and so only a luma delay was used in NTSC sets from 1955 onward at least until more sophisticated hardware became available in the late 80's.
NTSC employed both PAL and PAF throughout most of the 1952 tests. This was because of the bandwidth constraints of the US 6 MHz channel meant in order to achieve a higher chrominance resolution, quadrature vestigial modulation was used to encode the R-Y and B-Y color difference signals. Because a line and field delay was not yet economically available, they relied upon visual display averaging to cancel quadrature crosstalk errors. The PAL alternating R-Y created a bad line flicker which was always very obvious. The Alternation at field rate was more tolerable. But the flicker remained bad hence the abandonment of PAL and PAF. The NTSC quadrature modulation compromise was a higher bandwidth I channel only and narrowband Q. It was a tight squeeze. And by 1955-56 NTSC receivers even abandoned the extra I resolution.
In the early 1960's it was interesting that the British engineers, when they had the opportunity to discard the 405 system and introduce and entirely new 625 line system, they chose an 8MHz channel to facilitate wide band quadrature R-Y and B-Y modulation for higher resolution NTSC implementation. As late as early 1967, the BBC still planned an NTSC system and the the PAL modification came at the last moment to align with Germany and most of Europe.
The NTSC abandonment of PAL and PAF had nothing to do with tube count. It was all about trying to cancel quadrature crosstalk with the vestigial sideband chroma.
I also contend that the simpler mathematical relationship in NTSC which provided better frequency interleaving coupled with the 8MHz UK channel vs the US 6MHz channel means that the colour television pictures would have been better with NTSC than PAL.
@@philipnasadowski1060 Eventually NTSC had near parity with PAL. The main difference being the 525 line / 29.97 fpsdthh. vs 625 line / 25 fps rates and increased broadcast bandwidth.
I can tell you the 1972 Munich Olympic event was a nightmare for Germany.
This is going to be quite the show!
as a german, i love this
With the East German SECAM system, transmissions were sometimes still in black and white.
But in contrast to the PAL system, the color carrier was switched off with SECAM for b/w transmission.
Gonna enjoy this
Edit after premiere: Glad I managed to sneak in a reference to the old CZcams rating system at the end :).
Please make a video about South Africa not getting television until 1976.
And always in colour
I was there around that time. On the ship I was on we had a multi-system TV. our visitors were amazed to see we had colour. There was one channel which broadcast in Afrikaans and English.
I was chatting to a barman in Durban. He was telling me that they could only watch soccer once a week for 40 minutes.
I told him we got golf. He thought I was lying. My parting shot was to tell him we had fishing on tv.
13:02 That looks like some version of GE's cheap&cheerful "Portacolor" TV, which was modified for PAL by some European manufacturers. There was also a version with only 1 tuning knob shipped to the UK. The US version remained in production through the late 1970s, making it one of the last all-tube (except for the UHF tuner) TV sets made. Despite its lowly status, it was the first TV with an inline gun layout, which paved the way for the design of the Sony Trinatron.
Trinitron
Trinitrin
10:33 The first time, color was on the new created 2nd chain, that was made color ready. The transition to color on the 1st program was a little later
Intersting indeed - thank you
very much for your video!
This series of mini documentaries are excellent! ⭐
Thank you! Share them around on socials let's spread the word!
Perhaps it should be mentioned that East German TV sets still could receive western broadcasts in black and white.
And the only places in GDR where West German TV couldn't be received were parts in the Northeast (along the Polish border) and the area around Dresden. These places became colloquially known as the Tal der Ahnungslosen (German for 'Valley of the clueless') with ARD standing for Außer (the English translation could be either 'except' or 'outside') Rügen und Dresden
@@ivaneurope I've also heard the term Außer Raum Dresden.
There was a club of enthusiasts who used to pick up a extremely snowy b&w image of a test card from another country. Took a long time exposure of screen and when the photo developed got back a perfect hi-res image as good as today HDtv and get this, no lines on the image.
Due to B/G system used both FRG and GDR. While Most Eastern Bloc used D/K system. UK and Ireland used I system. French is different using L system which in AM audio and positive modulation. While B/G, D/K and I system using FM audio and negative modulation.
@@Alozhatos yes. On my YT channel I have VHS recordings, made by a B/G only VCR, of several incompatible broadcasts.
The PAL TV format is also used in Australia and New Zealand too. I have my main HD TV se to 100Hz (or PAL with progressive scan).
A very interesting doc! 🎉
Thank you my love 😘✨️❤️
This is amazing video And I have a good video idea where are you talk about the history of Film 4 (well I think most people would find that boring but I think I would enjoy it)
In Hungary, we had our two TV channel broadcasted in SECAM, as in all the other Eastern-Block countries. However in the nineties, long after communism ended, we're transitioned to PAL. The first test broadcast on a Saturday afternoon in 1992. They weren't aired in PAL the whole day, only one programme, which was the first _Star Trek_ movie.
I remember the black screen started running for a moment when they switched from SECAM to PAL on the fly, then the announcer informed us, the audience about this test run and then the movie started.
We had PAL in Romania though, which was a bit inconvenient for those living close to the borders. Since the national television was only crap and propaganda especially in the late 80s, we used to watch only the neighbors TV shows, which were generally much better. There was a small private and partially illegal industry oriented around this, with converters, amplifiers, high-gain antennas and such. I think Yugoslavia used PAL (?), but everyone else used SECAM indeed.
The lucky ones living on the west side could get Hungarian and Yugoslavian TV shows, those were the best, but others like me living in Bucharest could only get Russian TV (that was crap too) and Bulgarian TV. I was obsessed back then with receiving Western TV shows, to the point of conflict with my neighbors at the sight of my monstrous antennas (7 meters in length) needed for such task.
For my family (east germany) the Black and White era lasted to the 90's when the country reunited, since we couldn't effort those fancy color TV's. Heck, even the rather bad east german Black and White TV we had (Luxomat), we only could buy through some financial aid from relatives from the west. When we finally got a color TV it was a very cheap and very small one without any fancy features. Even my first attempts on programming on a C64 (again in the early 90's) I did on an old east german B/W Luxomat TV with dying phospor layer, so I always had to darken the room to see the rather fuzzy image.
SECAM provided a better video quality. But the "on site" processing of various SECAM signals required more elaborate and costly studios.
In the early '60's I was an Army brat living in a small town north of Stuttgart.We left in 1966. Stuttgart had Armed Forces broadcasting. My landlady Frau Heffner learned a lot of her Americanischer by watching Armed Forces TV.
Most of the countries in the Easten Bloc and the European part of the Soviet Union switched gradually from SECAM to PAL in the 90's. Greece, which has been on the other side (i.e. part of the Western Bloc), had been using SECAM when color television was introduced to the country in the late 70's before they (as well as Cyprus) also switched to PAL around the same time. The last users of SECAM in Europe outside France have been Russia and Belarus (both have switched to the DVB standart). Nowdays color standarts are pretty much irrelevant as most countries around the world have completed the transition to digital television.
Also, the USSR had been experimented with their own color TV stadart since the 60's in OKSM (itself based on the 625-line NTSC standart) before abandoning it and for the 50th Anniversery of the October Revolution in 1967 the USSR had their first color broadcast in SECAM. Czechoslovakia had initially testing color service using the PAL technology, but after the crushing of the Prague Spring, the new government went with SECAM instead
Most of the world has gone digital but there are still different standards in different countries.
The US adopted the ATSC standard. Europe adopted the DVB-T standard along with countries like Australia. Japan has its own thing (ISDB) and China also developed its own standard.
And now we have some countries pushing to replace their current digital standards with new ones (and force everyone to buy new gear for no reason). More specifically the US with the push for the new ATSC 3.0 standard (what exactly makes it better than the current ATSC standard anyway?)
In Czechoslovakia, Secam was used for broadcasting, but TV studios worked in PAL internally.
@@xsc1000 One of my favorite pictures on Ebay was a SONY TBC for the C format (1" CVBS recorder) with stickers that said PAL and Paris.
Romania and former Yugolsavia used P.A.L.
I remember watching Pot Black (snooker) on BBC2 in the 1970s , when the commentator (Ted Lowe as the internet reminds me !) said ""and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green."
I am pretty sure I was still watching in Black and White (monochrome) , and although it's laughed at now, it did make sense !
My Dad ( I was only a primary school child in the 1970s) didn't get a colour TV until 1978 !
I thought I remembered "The pink ball is behind the blue" , maybe I'm going senile !
The first TVs had a huge letter 'H' antenna like 3:52. Live near Crystal Palace TVs had antenna inside TV. The genius of adding colour was that the monochrome retained its full bandwidth image and the colourisation added in a lower resolution because the eye doesn't notice lower resolution colour. Of course TV then had full temporal information, zero loss of temporal detail unlike today's digitally compressed for bandwidth reduction. Every single frame was 100% area updated in its entirety every frame, so subtle movement was depicted that gets missed by lossy MPEG compression
This is incorrect.
Although analog video was 25 (PAL) or 30 (NTSC) frames per second, it was in fact double of due to frames sent out as fields.
That's why live broadcast or stuff recorded directly on video tapes have a smoother motion, the so-called soap opera effect.
Digital video could capture the full video signal since MPEG-2, saving every field. The problem was with this is that early digital video enthusiasts didn't know about the fields basically being separate frames, and they often omitted them by choosing the wrong deinterlace method basically threw every other fields away, when they archived their tapes.
Digital broadcast tv only sends lower resolution keyframes and it's too bandwidth-crippled to send full resolution keyframe for every frame. About one key frame every second or two as I remember, then what's left of the bandwidth it tries its best it can to update the most noticeable moving parts of the image hoping no one notices what it can't keep up with. And HD resolution is only attained on still images through 'stacking'.
Anyway I had left out detail about frames/fields/interlace to make it clearer to illustrate the point I'm making is there's much more bandwidth for conveying subtle detail that bandwidth-crippled DTV misses. Detail you cant 'un-see' after you've seen it in pure end-to-end analog tv and that's conspicuous by its absence in broadcast dtv. Even with its interlace at half the rate, end-to-end analog still had way more temporal resolution than broadcast dtv has, and atv had approached 24 fps cine film.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed that today's TV sales areas the demo pictures is nearly always Tropical Fish swimming around (mostly horizontally), or a slowly panning and zooming Landscape? Reason is so the crippled bandwidth isn't consumed so there's almost the full bandwidth to allocate for element 'stacking' to develop HD detail. This is so detail stays well-attached to the deliberately slowly moving elements. They don't tend to show fast moving close up sport scenes in the tv sales floor because the detail and texture of the same element then moves in different directions as the compression algorithm gets confused!
The temporal resolution bit was very evident when i chose to get a MiniDV camcorder in the mid 2000s, instead of a MPEG-based mini DVD camcorder. MiniDV uses frame by frame compression, and for its time it was very good.
@@mfbfreak mini-DV 25 Mbit/sec on tape. Lossy compression but at least it's done on a frame-by-frame basis. I guess that's what keeps all the picture elements free of temporal distortion. Audio as I remember has no compression at all.
Canada has such a complicated history of color tv it’s not even funny. You should do a segment on that. Some private channels continued in black and white until at least 1981, most major network stations all converted in 1978, Color was available from the US since the 50s.
Well this is something completely unexpected and interesting.......and I LOVE IT!
When you mentioned about the East Germans having the abilities to receive the PAL signal in the late 1970s and 1980s, there were two areas in East Germany that could not receive PAL signal due to the geographic profile: one in eastern Saxony area (Dresden) and another one in Vorpommerns (Western Pomerania). Those areas were called _Tal der Ahnungslosen_ (Valley of Clueless). Prior to the eventual tolerance of East German government, the _Freie Deutsche Jugend_ (Free German Youth) and schoolchildren were explicitly instructed to report any TV aerial pointing in the "wrong direction" or their parents watching the western programmes.
Would you be able to do one on the Republic of Ireland starting colour?
An interesting side story regarding RTÉ’s (long) transition to colour is that they didn’t have nearly enough equipment for 1971 (when they were required to shoot the Eurovision Song Contest from Dublin, in colour) so had to borrow colour-capable camera equipment from the BBC.
@@JeSuisRene I heard that colour properly started around 1973 but some parts weren't able to receive colour until 1976.
@@pak8606 I’ve heard something similar though they were (somehow) able transmit Wimbledon in colour in 1968. That said, 1976 lines up as that is when Studio 1 of Television Centre Dublin (where the Late Late Show comes from) was finally fitted with colour cameras. (Worth noting that the Eurovision in 1971 was an outside broadcast from the Gaiety Theatre, hence how RTÉ were able to borrow the colour cameras from the BBC).
@@JeSuisRene Wasn't RTÉ once said to stand for Reception Terrible Everywhere?
It's mindboggling how back in the day one or two blokes in grey/white coats actually came to your home to deliver and set up your new telly. It was almost like they were delivering a grand piano! (And almost cost as much...)
Today you chuck a cheap plastic fantastic made in Chine PoS in your shopping trolley, slap it on your wall, only to chuck it in the trash 2-3 years later. Apparently they call it "progress"...
I still have our family Blaupunkt telly that served reliably for 30 years in the kitchen on an almost daily basis. (Aside from some oxide buildup on contacts and cracked solder joints, it's had no issues). Oh, the innards are actually by Grundig. 😉
Initially the East German television should be television for all Grrmany, so they used the same standard as West Germany.
After building the Berlin wall, this was a big disadvantage to the East German government, because the East Germans watched West German television.
When introducing color, they choose Secam, so they could make West German television not attractive. But the majority simply kept black and white TV sets, so they started to made multi norm television sets what can decode beside East European Secam also West German PAL.
The early colourful tv-sets in east germany could only decode secam, thats true. But the later ones, at least from the 80s decoded secam and pal, so watching western television was colourful as well.
PAL = NTSC with phase alternation of the colour signal to reduce colour transmission distortion by averaging the colour on alternate lines which were transmitted with alternating polarity.
It was a work of genius by the engineers at RCA and Philco to figure out how to transmit the colour signal in the spaces between the spectral lines of the BW signal enabling compatibility with BW receivers and within the same bandwidth as purely BW transmissions.
Don't forget the big european TV-event: The Eurovision Song Grand Prix .
This is interesting story about German Color TV. In Poland (as part of eastern block) color TV was introduced around 1973, and do not think that they introduced polish color television set earlier the 1979 (Jowisz), however they did assembly Russian color tvs untill that time. In Poland production of dual system TVs was push by popularity of VCRs and (western) satellite tv. in second have o 1980s. If you have the money you buy mostly western (japanese) VCR and TV., and they were very popular. All the bootleg video cassettes were in PAL, and satellite broadcast was in PAL too.
7:00 The Olympic games in 1972 pushed color tvs. Also East Germany has television advertisements for taking the games as opportunity to change to color. But it was mainly, where it was impossible to get ARD and ZDF, too far from Westberlin, too far from the border.
British TV engineers disliked NTSC because it was Never Twice the Same Colour.
But later realized that with PAL Problems Are Lurking. The East Germans then decided on a "System Essentially Contrary to the American Method" (SECAM).
you've singled out the colour system as the reason east german sets could not receive west german broadcasts- this is only part of the picture, so to speak, & wasn't done as a deterrent.
so long as the line standard is similar, you'd get a picture.
development of secam began while france had 819 & 441 systems in use, but by the time it was ready to deploy to the public, france had adopted 625.
so by 1969, enterprising east germans could buy PAL decoders & modify their receivers themselves.
however, a different offset of the audio subcarrier would have been, & was more of a hindrance.
again, this wasn't deliberate- these numbers tend to fall out of the equations when you're designing a television format's waveforms & need a simple mechanism to reliably produce all the necessary frequencies in a low-cost receiver. most likely is that they just refused to adopt the same spectrum-use standards as the west, & finagled these numbers accordingly.
these standards also vary in other parts of the world, for a variety of reasons.
adoption of PAL technology by the eastern bloc would have fed into the economies of the west & its allies, too.
wp:
"PAL and SECAM are just standards for the color sub-carrier, used in conjunction with ITU television broadcast systems for the base monochrome signals, identified with letters such as M, B/G, D/K, and L.
These signals are much more important to compatibility than the color sub carriers are. They differ by AM or FM sound modulation, signal polarization, relative frequencies within the channel, bandwidth, etc. For example, a PAL D/K TV set will be able to receive a SECAM D/K signal (although in black and white), while it will not be able to decode the sound of a PAL B/G signal. So even before SECAM came to Eastern European countries, most viewers (other than those in East Germany and Yugoslavia) could not have received Western programs. This, along with language issues, meant that in most countries monochrome-only reception did not pose a significant problem for the authorities."
In east Germany black and white was still common in 1990. i was watching an old tv show from east Germany. i thought it was made in the 60s until someone mentioned Rambo. most pictures from the 80s where also black and white.
From what I understand a PAL tv receiving a SECAM signal will only show black and white since it can't decode the color information. I believe the reverse was also true, a SECAM tv would only show PAL as black and white. I think by the mid 90's most TV's sold in Europe and Germany were multi-standard, they could decode PAL, SECAM and NTSC.
It was probably trivial by that point as a single color decoder chip has all three standards built in. I'm thinking early models of multi-standard TV's had a switch you needed to change, while later ones automatically locked. I remember my uncle in Germany had a TV that seemed to switch standards effortlessly on cable, between the mostly PAL signals on cable to the few NTSC signals like CNN.
My extended family was Germany, so we would visit every few years from the United States. Both my uncles and grandparents had color TV's while back home in the U.S. my father still hadn't bought a color TV into the 80's because the old Zenith just kept on working.. Plus, I think he still thought they were expensive like they were in the 60's when they moved to the U.S. and bought a used black and white TV. It felt like a luxury when we finally got a color TV.
@@marcusdamberger However, converting the picture tube deflection units to 60 Hz is not as easy as a digital multi-standard signal processing chip.
PAL: phase alternating line means that color information are transmitted as phase of TV wave. Phase modulation is less susceptible to noise and error than FM. And by changing phase 180 degree for each other lines (alternating scan lines of even/odd order), the phase error can be canceled, so reduces phase error further when viewed in CRT. So PAL colors are more faithful to original image color than NTSC. So while NTSC TV set has color adjustment nob, but PAL TV set doesn't need color adjustment. Con is it needs a delay line, rather expensive parts, to store image/color information of one scan line to cancel error of next scan line.
In East Germany the ARD (Allgemeiner Rundfunk Deutschland) station also was named Außer Raum Dresden (excluding Dresden Area) in Dresden it was almost impossible to watch Western TV because the Area is in a valley an was unable to receive western TV.
They also called it "Tal der Ahnungslosen" Valley of the unsuspecting ones 😉
It's interesting how the Tal der Ahnungslosen now seems to be the most Nazi infested part of East Germany. I wonder if there is a connection.
There is a story, but unconfirmed, that it was known how to get rid of NTSC's phasing errors at the design stage but the delay line technology to do so didn't exist in the early 1950's. How true this is, I don't know.
There was a 'AutoTune' switch which worked when new but after age it would drift out of calibration, making it auto-tune to an annoyingly wrong correction tint. Bit like music autotune. Then people preferred the switch off anyway so they can set the color tint to own taste.
PAL of course canceled out tuning error by making the phase 'AC' instead of 'DC' and the average of AC is always zero. By the time NTSC was rolled out it was too late to include any this because changes the architecture
It is true. The NTSC in 1952 did much PAF and PAL testing. The NTSC abandoned the Colour Phase Alternation because of the absence of the glass delay line which only became available later.
@@tedrobinson372 surface acoustic wave chroma delay line was a few decades later.
There were other DL available in the 50s which didn't use mechanical.
@@jagmarc there were no cost effective 64us delay lines available in the early 1950's which made the NTSC's effort to use Color Phase Alternation practical. The first PAL receivers in the late 1960s incorporated the glass acoustic surface delay.
The 60s Sobel colour TV we had was pre- glass chroma delayline. It had two electrical DL both of them coils of wire. @@tedrobinson372
You forgot to say about the signal resolution, ntsc has a lower signal resolution, i.e. 720x480 and always the wrong colors. That's why all american tv records are vertically blurred and look like crap.
Luckily I live in PAL country.
South Africa only got a TV service in 1976, believe it or not.
cottoned on:
:to begin to understand something : to catch on
what is the song in the beginning?
And who is the collector with the Kaiser, Kuba Porta Color, Rembrandt TV set etc...?
The flag of the Federal Republic of Germany is wrong, it has three coloured stripes and nothing else
13:33 Germany did not reunify "a few years" after the wall came down. The wall came down on 9 November 1989 and Germany reunified on 3 October 1990, so less than one year later. Also, Germany did not reunify after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Soviet Union collapsed on 26 December 1991, more than one year after German reunification.
We still made fun of that colorswitching in the early 2000s in Germany
West and East Germany used the same TV standard for black and white and the same channel spacing and sound standard. So it was no problem for 3/4 East Germans to watch West German TV programs. The West German transmitters were in Berlin and along the inner German border.
Especially in Bavaria there was a TV station on channel 3 with 100kW!
At times, the power was increased again when political messages were to be carried to the GDR. But there was also political trouble with overreach and attempted jamming. The station used as much electricity as a small town.
East German TV sets had no built-in PAL decoder and could only do SECAM.
The SECAM tv's in the GDR with these signals would see a black and white version, as they couldn't decode the PAL signal. But who cares if your in the east and watching west German television. Modifying a SECAM tv for PAL decoding became a thing. I just wonder if it was a known hack by every electronics repair shop in east Germany or just your friends bother who knew a guy who could do it for cheap. Did the east German government do any crack downs on people or businesses that made the modifications? I would think they would care more about just receiving the west German signal whether it's black and white or color is irrelevant.
I'm not saying I'm old but I do miss Bairds 30-line spinning disc 😅
I wonder what the East Germans thought of the West's programming. It must have been kind of weird to have that peek over the wall. I know there was probably not that much interest in the opposite direction, but again, it must have been strange to anyone capable of receiving such signals. It's like how, in Canada, for a long time, we received a lot of American stations. Their products would be different - we often got things much later, mostly tech like new models of phones, due to having to adapt it for our language laws. It was also less affordable to us as a whole. It was extremely odd to see advertising for things that simply did not exist in my country at all, and then being in a store about a year later and going "oh, like on TV!"
Big parts of Eastern Germany could receive the West German signal. The black and white television standards were compatible and later TV’s sold in East Germany could receive the West German channels (older sets had the channel selection carefully chosen to make it hard to receive the West German tv channels). This was helped by big transmitters in West Berlin, which was circled by East Germany. They could watch the West German channels in black and white. There was ofcourse a black market with PAL compatible sets, but most of the people in the East didn’t have the money for that.
There’s even a term for the regions in East Germany where the Western signal didn’t reach, Tal der Ahnungslosen. That translates to the valley of the clueless. They also joked in the East that ARD, the West German broadcaster stood for Außer Rugen und Dresden (except for in Rugen and Dresden). It’s pretty well covered on Wikipedia if you were interested.
I grew up in West Berlin due to my parents being sent there for work, and we could receive both but with the East German channels in black and white, and it was weird to see things either completely ignored by the Eastern TV channels or completely misrepresented. Those were weird times.
For me, West German television was believable and East German television told lies
@4:53 Why is the guy in the middle playing with his colleague's tie?
Color tv was invented in Mexico, 1946. By Guillermo Ginzales Camarena.
Well, NO.
He invented a "Field Sequential" color-wheel type of "color television."
(See Wikipedia, Guillermo González Camarena)
This needed a "Colour Wheel" to spin in exact synchronism with a "white" image to produce the "Colour" - as perceived by the humam eye
This was also attempted to be developed by CBS
This silly business of having a bulky "Low Frequency", high revolution "Scanning Disk" used to produce a "Scanned Image" has been proved - since John Logie Baird - to be completely IDIOTIC (Low Definition and Dangerous) - as opposed to "Electronic Manipulation".
Because the USA's television system has always been privately owned and commercially operated, there never was a glorious national moment when color first was activated. Instead, it happened station by station, gradually in the 1950s and '60s, over the thousands of stations that existed, based on which network they were affiliated with.
In Europe were two different standards for how to put video and audio portion into the TV channel. East Germany followed the West European standard, because the TV station should be for whole Germany.
After building the Berlin Wall they regret this and the fact, that West television was available in much parts of East Germany except East Saxony and East North Germany. So it was helpful, that West television could only be received in bw.
But they couldn't sell color television. Much people watched mainly West German television. So, they offered television sets with PAL and tolerated, that the PAL decoder will be used.
First, the radio stations were re-established with Allied licenses. Because today's Baden-Württemberg was still partly administered by the French and partly by the Americans, the federal state had two different radio stations. In the north, the NWDR was founded under license from the English. This was later divided into the NDR (Lower Saxony), WDR (North Rhine-Westphalia) and SFB (Berlin)
The ARD (working_group broadcasting Germany) is the merger of radio stations to operate TV
This was mainly assigned VHF channels.
The TV news program "Tagesschau" is the successor to the "Wochenschau" shown in the cinemas.
The TV brings daily news from all over the world in the cinema there was only weekly
I was born in 1965, We always had a color set. Even when I was a tiny child. Then again the US got color in 1955.
Yes, the US had color very early, but it took long with the transition. In Germany, it was introduced in 1967, but at this time all TV stations were able to broadcast color. The only question was, how much shows are in color. We had Bonanza, Star Trek, Porky Pig Show, all broadcasted in color. Also the color episodes of My favorite Martian and of I dream of Jeannie and not to forget The Flintstones. I think, in 1972 most of the programs were in color. For the German counterpart to "All in the family" they reshot some bw episodes in color.
There is a Hungarian cartoon show, produced shortly before introducing color and produced in color, it's about a crazy family who found a way to communicate with the grandgrandgrand... etc. grandson in the far future and he gives his ancestors the latest technology. First episode was a holographic television, to replace the broken television and this was so realistic, that the TV news over a water pipe flooded the apartment.
I liked this show, that had a similar goal like the Flintstones. Animation and drawing was more like Charlie Brown.
@@robfriedrich2822 "Till Death Us do part" heisst das BBC Original von Ein Herz und eine Seele. Die Beerdigung wurde nicht in Farbe neu gedreht. Meine Lieblingsstelle ist die Fruehgeburt: 0h2222. Eine Neuauflage ist Anfang des Jahrtausends schon auf Drehbuch Entwurf Ebene gescheitert, Ich habe jedenfalls nur ein paar Seiten bekommen.
I do hope the irony wasn't lost on the German people who had forked out a shed load of money on a colour TV to watch the World Cup that their team won wearing a black and white kit! 🤔
DDR TV was much better in one aspect - it surely aired kretek, everyones favourite commie cartoon :D tho, nu pogadi was also great
PAL system was pretty genious, not only 50/25 frames are closer to the propper cinema 24 frames but also the picture quality was far better than on the american NTSC system.
SECAM was, well s**t, the only reason it existed was because France has always been an island in terms of technology and they always wanted to be different and create everything independent, it was inferior to any other standard in every possible way.
Was zenith and RCA the leading brands of tv sets
USSR SECAM is not the same as French SECAM. Sound standard is different, color is not showing up when trying to watch something on soviet SECAM TV. PAL and French SECAM are somewhat compatible.
The sound carrier is not part of the colour system, but part of the TV system, which is the source of the incompatibilities.
That's very true. In the 1980s PAL televisions sold near the iron curtain had a SECAM-East module in Germany, and sets sold in the southwest near the french border one for Secam-West.
Also interesting, back then I owned a Commodore computer monitor with a VCR as tuner that certainly did only PAL. In December 1989, DFF2 all of a sudden appeared in color. I was baffled, because the east german television was seriously RACING to rename themselves from DDR television back to DFF AND even to change to PAL-To the best of my knowledge, without much of a heads-up. It was a turbo attempt to get rid of all the socialism from their programming. Even the infamous propaganda show "Der schwarze Kanal" had to go, with a last measly 5 minutes for famous last words.
I have to seriously wonder how they could manage the changeover so quickly. Televisions made by RFT in the GDR had PAL built in, so set-wise not an issue. But what about the studio tech?
@@amurtigress_mobile365 Television studios didn't use SECAM internally, but the generation of the color subcarrier and the "merging" of the chrominance into the video signal only happens "just in time" for broadcasting. In order to switch from SECAM to PAL you'd basically only have to replace the (chrominance) modulator and not all the equipment.
You can even play back a VHS tape that was recorded on a SECAM VCR on a PAL VCR and vice versa because the tape "format" and the recorders are the same - the only difference is the tuner/demodulator (which can be either PAL or SECAM [or both]) and the modulator which generates a signal (either with PAL or with SECAM color encoding) that is then fed to the TV while playing the (exact same) video tape.
Professional TV studios don't "mix" their signals into a composite signal for internal use, so there basically is no PAL, SECAM or NTSC color encoding at all until the signal gets fed into a transmitter.
@@amurtigress_mobile365Television studios in the eastern bloc mostly used PAL equipment, because editing PAL signals is much easier and SECAM signals directly. Because PAL uses QAM, basically meaning the color carrier’s amplitude to encode saturation and phase to encode the hue, so mixing two PAL signals together produces a perfectly acceptable PAL color signal. Because SECAM encodes color on two FM subcarriers, if you try to mix two SECAM signals, you would either get the color of one of your inputs, or you would get nothing.
Effects like chroma keying are much easier to do with a PAL signal than with a SECAM signal: with PAL you just have a device that removes the signal of one input triggered by a certain phase of the color carrier. Imagine how hard would that be to do with a SECAM signal.
SECAM was used only for political reasons and when the Cold War ended, most countries switched to PAL as soon as they could. PAL is technically superior to SECAM, and it didn’t cause much of an issue, because a color TV set was literally a luxury item in the eastern bloc. A lot of people only had their first color TV set in the early 90s, when the market opened up to cheap Asian multi standard TV sets.
@@amurtigress_mobile365 Because Secam is not well suited for studio operations, many studios used PAL and converted it to Secam on output.
It's laughable how the adaptation of color television by Germany not only mimicked the introduction sequence of it made by the U.S. but also tried to improve upon it with PAL (Often called "perfect at last") that didn't hold color as well as the system it was trying to improve upon, after almost a decade of development.
As an American, I'm laughing in NTSC. 😂
I thought you'd be green with envy ..or feeling a little blue?! 😜
As a European, I'm laughing AT NTSC. 😀
It would be a good documentary to describe how American and Japanese engineers got the early, first-mover analog NTSC to work as well as PAL, eventually.
Hint: It's not pronounced See Cam.
1:16 "I'm sure you know who." Best way to not say the Nazi Party Leader's name on CZcams.
I always like the Berlin tv tower. The one thing the communists left that was good 😂
Moscow dictated that East Germany use SECAM, so wouldn't the TV manufacturers there be PUNISHED for offering PAL with their TV sets as well?
I don't think dictated is the right term. East Germany was quite independent from the USSR, to the point when Gorbachev ordered them to do perestroika, they resisted all the way until 1989 and quietly attacked him for revisionism. As for tv standards, I have a Soviet Horizont tv from the late 80s that has a triple SECAM, PAL and NTSC capability (this was the time video recorders were becoming popular), so rules were loosening over time in the USSR as well.
@@ilyatsukanov8707 Dont compare 60s and 70s with late 80s with perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, PAL was choosen in 60s but after soviet agression, Secam was choosed. Fortunatly studios remained in PAL.
Horizont from late 80s used copied Philips ICs, because soviets couldnt develope its own modern equivalents.
pal and secam seemed like a good idea in the 60s but in the late 70s 80s 90s and 2000s and video games became a thing it was a real disappointment.
when Soviet Union startet/choose their color TV?
I think DDR had no choise, and had to follow follow rules set for "democratic" countries in Moscow.
I also think, it was no disadvantage to the East German government, that West German television couldn't be watched in color.
Just a heads up. The new Big brother logo has been revealed. Make a video about it.
If I'm honest I couldn't care less about Big Brother 😂 I think one video was more than enough!
The logo is all bright and colourful, returning this autumn of 2023. It was announced on July 31st 2023. It features a question mark, an exclamation mark, a lightning bolt contributing to eye of the storm, an X. A blinking eye, a crying eye, a smile and more that there is way too much to cover. I'm not even joking. This is all real!
@@AdamMartynAre you sure? Revealed on July 31st, The logo is bright and colourful with a Question mark, an exclamation mark, a lightning bolt contributing to eye of the storm, an X two eyes one blinking and one tearing, a broken Heart a pound sign, the words big and brother, a smile, a hashtag and more that I can't explain😅.
@@AdamMartynLogo: multicoloured symbols with a smaller eye in the centre.
Do it
Jerries were buying tellies to watch the coronation? Seems a bit far fetched.
The video is a bit too much focused on the USSR and the western powers. After 1949, the GDR was mostly an independent and sovereign country which had Soviet soldiers on its territory because the Allies didn’t acknowledge East Germany as a separate country and therefore didn’t acknowledge East German authorities. The history of east and west Germany is unfortunately really overlooked in the English-speaking world. It’s always like: "after ww2 there were occupation zones, then the Berlin Wall was built, then the Berlin Wall fell.“
Interesting subject but speak slower and take a breath between each sentance!
Television in the 60s was full of clowns 😂
Color??looks black & white to me.
again ... The French system is forgotten. There was TV in France before the war also. After the war, France wanted HD (819 lines) Colour transmission in SECAM in HD was very difficult to achieve (needing larger bandwidth).
The French "tv-history" is quite complicated as all the French administration wanted was protect the own market.
The "Key" may be "needing larger bandwidth".
This means fewer "channels" for any "Band" of frequencies.
If there are only One or Two "Government" channels - this may not matter.
BUT
if one allows Commercial; "Competition", the number of available channels becomes critical.
The early German (375 Line) TV system, operating in the first regularly operating TV Station
(in Berlin from 22 March 1935, and a later "sister station", operating in Paris from 1942 to 1944 )
may also be forgotten.
See Wikipedia, "Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow "
and
Wikipedia, "375-line television system."
Germany was divided into 3 sections the western allies zone the Russianzone and the polish zone this was 27% of 1937 germany and required the forceful expulsion of over 14 million Germans 2 million died in the process.
France had never switched to PAL! Where have found this info?
Totally wrong! Sorry!
Production devices, yes. Diffusion, never!
Color*
We Brits spell it as “colour”, educate yourself.
@@tokublwhovian nobody cares how you spell it in your fictional country
@@FlopFan69 Same goes for you in your fictional country.
This is a sort of ai generated stuff which blends on youtube.
Your understanding or your skills or your aha experience will not have any enhancment after thi
s example of noncense talk.
This is an example of mungo jungo speech which sounds human to our ears but have no sort of valuable information.
Is there an automatic function to erase it,before its entrance....?
8:20 If I‘m correct, this is a Volksfernsehempfänger, one of the first TV sets produced by the Nazis, that never made it into mass production due to the war.