Quote:
Originally Posted by paulsherwin
Do you mean that UK 405 productions looked bad on the Australian system? That's because they would have been 16mm telerecordings. The 405 system gave very good results on the 405 TVs of the day. It was abandoned for reasons of standardisation within Europe, not because it performed poorly.
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My recollection is that in the 1960s in New Zealand, most overseas TV programmes came in as 16 mm films. Some were originated that way, and some apparently were transferred from videotape or perhaps recorded on film from live transmissions.
According to my memory, those from the USA were not too bad. The typical giveaway as to their video origin was the presence of image orthicon artefacts, such as black fringing around bright parts of a scene.
Those from the UK were sometimes not very good at all, and I seem to recall that Granada programmes were the worst. The problem was poor vertical definition, to the point where images looked blurred. I’d guess that the transfer to film was done using 405-line monitors with significant spot-wobble to avoid visible lines and to obtain reasonable flatness of field. As the British TV companies moved to 625 lines for production, the problem went away.
Sound quality was different too. The American programmes seemed to have been recorded at a higher level, with some peak clipping evident. The British programmes were typically recorded at a lower level, with background hiss often apparent, particularly noticeable when one fed the TV sound (direct from the demodulator) into a hi-fi system. The levels as transmitted and received were not materially different, as there would have been gain equalization at the studio. Rather I am inferring a recording level difference from the results.
Cheers,