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Old 23rd Feb 2011, 9:12 pm   #21
murphyv310
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Hi.
I don't want to be drawn into a strong disagreement here but Practical TV back in the 50's actually would have figures of our exports of TV's to Europe and although not huge they were steady, I never ever recall any evidence to say that our product was problematical.
Take Practical TV May 1952 page 563 clearly states our radio etc exports to over £2m
The "Setmakers" is a good book but it really not a reference book, to list everything in the Radio & TV world (even just the UK) would require many volumes.
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Old 23rd Feb 2011, 10:42 pm   #22
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Quote:
Originally Posted by ppppenguin View Post
I look to Brian Cuff or others who worked at the BBC during the start of 625 to say how the pictures compared at the sending end.
It's not really a test to compare studio baseband pictures on professional monitors as the transmission system is not involved. However, I must say that the first 625 pictures I saw (from a flying spot telecine running a sharp "high accutance" 35mm print of Perry Mason, were, I my opinion then, spectacular. Also the change from IO to Plumbicon was well under way so there was a huge difference between the different studios and unfair comparisons were easily made. I will say that even in 1959, using the old Marconi MkIII cameras (Grandstand opening titles), 405 lines could give super pictures, the noise and a characteristic edginess of the IO gave a really sharp looking picture. The CPS Emitron cameras gave pictures which had an almost photographic look about them but I only saw those in 405 lines.

Last edited by Dave Moll; 24th Feb 2011 at 3:58 pm. Reason: quote fixed
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:46 am   #23
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

This is an enthralling thread!!

Paul M, I admire your research which is fascinating. I'd love to know more about the camera you say you built ten years ago, on another thread sometime perhaps. I've worked out ideas myself about building a camera and often wondered how practical it would be to actually build one, 405 lines of course!! Back on topic, I'm a bit younger- I remember only the last couple years of 405 transmissions- '83-85. But my every day set in my office is a KB dual standard VC2 set with a 23" screen I've restored. The pictures are superb and I have to say very usable despite no DC restoration. I wonder if viewers who stuck with black and white sets from the '60's to late '70's really thought of 405 pictures as inferior? The will to get rid of it wasn't from it's audience.

The "anti" 405 line cartoon you mention I think was featured in the PYE in house/sponsored magazine, the boss, as already mentioned hated 405 and was pushing the Gerber 625 system, after all PYE were exporting studio kit all over the world so one less system would make it easier, though no doubt there were other reasons too. I'd be interested in your findings when complete. I agree with you that politics and power were at play. Keep up the interesting research.

Trevor, I must say your comments summed up how I feel about the 405 line system. I missed out on 405 in it's heyday, when that's all there was. Despite this, I have a fondness that I can't quite explain for 405. Maybe it's because of it's relative simplicity, it's undemanding requirements in order to produce a good watchable picture, it's connections with a long gone home grown- almost cottage industry, links to better days gone passed (and better programmes?), the smell of warm valves, higher standards, it's uniqueness........when 405 was dying, I was just getting hooked. My contemporaries were into ZX Spectrums, 50cc Yamaha's, Walkman's and VHS video nasties. I on the other hand, looked forward to nothing more than to go home after school and watch my old two channel 405 line telly while I still could, even if the programmes were rubbish. UHF reception was terrible, 405 worked with a self tapping screw in the aerial socket! This has stayed with me. When those nasty people switched it all off, I vowed that one day, I'll build a converter and transmitter (modulator) so I could do so again. Thanks to the Aurora, happy days are here again. There's no rational way of explaining this syndrome!
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 10:44 am   #24
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

The 405 system did produce incredibly 'crisp' well locked pictures of good contrast and being VHF was incredibly easy to pick up even in city basements and horrendous locations. The public liked to focus on the fine line structure, one of the reasons why Ekco's 'Spot Wobble' never took off. The pictures looked 'smudged' similar to the early 625 line receivers that were introduced almost twenty years after the television service was restarted after the war.
It's all very well sitting at a desk in a studio watching test cards and pictures produced from high quality signals and viewing them on very expensive monitors. It was the end result received in the home that was important to service engineers and customers and believe me the 405 line service produced about as good as you could get from electronic television at that time.
Most of the World would gaze at our receivers and wonder how the hell we did it! I have no doubt a lot is owed to the BBC and ITA for maintaining such high standards at THAT TIME. The millions of H and X aerials on the roofs of working class terraced homes particularly in the north of England were proof the right decision was made after WW2. Expensive sophisticated receivers that gave little if any advantage over 405 lines would have been well out of scope for the average working man and the television service would have been the worst for it. There was also the problems introduced with flyback EHT in so much as the line output transformer had to cope with 16kc/s with a 625 line system. At that time only standard laminations were available and they struggled at 10kc/s. A look at the line transformer fitted in the Bush TV22F will confirm the extra expense required to scan a CRT at 16kc/s. High efficency ferrite cores did not become available until around 1952/53. A final point, how did 405 hold us back in 1946? It was not the system that held us back but the lack of components and wood for cabinets. It was not possible to keep up with the demand for crt's and certain valves such as high power rectifiers for H.T. supply. Mullard were importing huge numbers of MW22-7 and later tubes from the Mother Philips factory in the Netherlands and it was a while before we managed to catch up with demand and that was mainly due to improved manufacturing technique. This has nothing to do with line standards. Regards, John.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 11:41 am   #25
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

I'm not going into this further point by point, but very, very briefly, re:

<< A final point, how did 405 hold us back in 1946? >>

Of course, it didn't, but wise heads in government and industry knew that we would be building on sand if we went back with 405/50. Arguably it was Hobson's choice, but was it? This was probably a cabinet level decision and dominated by the opinions of the Treasury. It would be interesting to see what the Cabinet records have to say on this issue - they are available for inspection at the NAO, and the GPO archives of the period will be revealing too. The BBC would probably have had to do as it was told, so possibly not much in their written archives, but there will be something.

The Marconi Company was actively pushing for 625 by the late 40s (I have evidence) and, as has already been noted, Pye also. The old RMA must have an archive too? That could be revealing. At the bottom of all this is money and politics. We were broke, and we were likely to be saddled with a television system which was already out of date. The wise heads knew that we would lose our lead in a very few years, and that it would be left to the continentals and the Americans to forge ahead.

Our TV industries did make money, despite this handicap, but we could have done much better. Why, later on, did we not have our own proposals for colour TV coding? That was left to the Americans, the French, the Germans and the Russians. Whilst we can't *blame* 405 for that, it undoubtedly did hold us back. There has been a study done on this, and, if I get a few moments, I'll post the link.

All of this is pure hindsight, I know, but the 'Hobson's Choice' of 1946 was almost certainly another short-term Treasury expediency - justifiable, perhaps inevitable, but still regretable. That doesn't mean to say that we can't enjoy the memories of the TVs and of the programmes - we can - but we have to be realistic about the pragmatic yet unfortunate decisions taken by Whitehall in 1946.

Cheers,

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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:12 pm   #26
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Hi Paul.
I would think that studies and thesis are all very well and no doubt interesting. I do agree that politics came into it too. Remember we had just emerged from a major catastrophe, and as you correctly state we were skint but the 625 line system had strong links with the Germans so I really think at that time to suggest we adopt a system that had links with them would have been unpatriotic.
The thing is 405 went on till 1985 and was a very useable system that entertained a nation and very well. Experiments were done as you know with 405 line NTSC and I have personally watched programs on a PYE NTSC colour set, and have actually constructed an NTSC 405 line set myself. On subjective tests about 80% of the people that have seen the results can see no difference in comparison to 625.

I must be one of the few people left that have some national pride and I think it is wonderful that the UK has invented 50% of the "things" in the the world and Scotland 50% of that!

Out of that 50% it includes the wonderful 405 line Television System, which give me great pride that I was able to service British TV sets, running a British TV system, and not a German system being watched on Chinese Television sets!
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:15 pm   #27
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulM View Post
...we could have done much better. Why, later on, did we not have our own proposals for colour TV coding? That was left to the Americans, the French, the Germans and the Russians...
In this particular instance, British Industry could have done better. In fact, it was left to the BBC to make an effort.

The Russian NIR system seems to have been based, in concept at least, on proposals made by B.W.B. Pethers of the Beeb some time before: he proposed a system known as ART (Additional Reference Transmission), on which some work was done, but never published. It was quite ingenious: it transmitted an NTSC-like phase modulated signal on alternate lines, and a reference signal on the intervening lines. Both signals were modified in amplitude by a square-root function, and to recover the signals all you had to do was multiply the current chroma signal with that from the previous line derived from a delay-line. No burst was needed, or transmitted.

The system bit the dust when BBC direction ruled that there were enough competing sytems (NTSC, PAL and SECAM) on trial and one extra would only complicate and delay the task of selecting a winner. A pity, maybe, since it was a relatively simple way of getting round the problems (differential phase) that plagued the NTSC system without the complexities of PAL or the shortcomings of SECAM.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:31 pm   #28
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Here's the link to one of the papers on this issue, which includes the Pye cartoon!

http://www.fdcw.unimaas.nl/staff/fil...f%20Colour.pdf

Fickers has done a lot of work on this whole issue. He writes 405 off simply as a 'reverse salient' in this paper - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_salient

Cheers,

P.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:40 pm   #29
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

I knew Brian Pethers when both of us worked in the design lab of Michael Cox electronics. His system merits a brief mention in Carnt and Townsend's book.

If we exclude field sequential systems such as Baird and CBS as a blind alley, the main requirements for colour were compatibility with existing monochrome systems along with some way of doing it in no more than monochrome bandwidth. This was hinted at by Mertz and Gray in their 1934 analysis of TV scanning. Unless anyone knows differently the first attempt at using the gaps in the spectrum for colour was made at Hazeltine labs in the late 1940s. This was the direct ancestor of NTSC and PAL. Again unless there is evidence to the contrary, there was no UK development along these lines. French and Russian work with FM based colour systems didn't even attempt to fit the colour in the spectral gaps.

The principal colour display methods had no UK content either.

All of this is pretty much independent of the scanning standard. If we had used 405 line colour the techniques would still have been of US, German or French origin.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:49 pm   #30
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Hi Paul.
I think it is now time for me to bow out of this thread. My main reason for starting it was that I was annoyed by quite blatent 405 line bashing in a previous thread. I in no way wish to have an infraction or ban from the mods.
It looks as neither of the two of us will in any way give way from our feelings.

My last comment would be that although I havent read Andreas's documents I would suspect he is doing the same as me and promoting a European system whereas I am promoting a British system and rightly so, its a pity some here cannot stick up for their country.
Bye.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 1:57 pm   #31
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

I have just skimmed Fickers' paper. It gives clarity to the political landscape in which the colour system decisions were made. It completely misses the one yawning gulf of the period: the different frame rates of US and Europe which made programme interchange very difficult. It wasn't until the BBC made the first electronic frame rate converter in time for the 1968 Mexico Olympics that we had a satisfactory way to interchange programmes between 50Hz and 60Hz countries.

Ficker cites Francis McLean (BBC DE at the time) as supporting NTSC because of compatibility with the US. Without going back to the sources I can't check what McLean actually said but he would have been very aware of the much greater frame rate incompatibility, regardless of colour encoding system.

Fickers isn't quite as brutal about 405 as Paul suggested. Oddly, he hardly mentioned 819, which although intended as a forward move ended up as a backwater.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 2:17 pm   #32
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Re: << quite blatent 405 line bashing >>

405 has its important place in TV history - of that there is doubt - but TV was (and is) a global phenomenon. For patriotic reasons, if nothing else, I just wish that we could have been a bit more forward looking, and history (with hind sight) bears this out. We have a bad habit in the UK of being in the vanguard of things and then resting on our laurels, expecting the world to come to us.

With regards to Jeffrey's point, yes, agreed, he's maybe not as cutting in this paper about 405, but he has written a lot more elsewhere.

Perhaps it is time to close this thread, but if nothing else, I hope that it has taken us beyond the simply technical in our collective understanding of the development of television - and in particular 405's place in it, our governments of yester-year and all the other bodies and companies which shaped it.

Cheers,

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Old 24th Feb 2011, 5:02 pm   #33
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

This is worth considering .. had we gone along the 625 route, what impact would that have had on the launch of the ITA service? I very much doubt BBC national coverage could have been achieved (mostly) with Band I alone, meaning Band III would have been used more. This would very likely have forced us onto UHF before the technology was ready (in fact it probably wasn't even when BBC2 was launched!) - or significantly held us back. What commercial impact could that have had on our recovering economy? I'd be interested to know when the Continentals started launching additional channels, and what bands were used.

Remember the US channel allocation is much narrower than that used in Europe (and needed for decent quality 625-line transmissions) with resultant lack of definition on their 525-line system - this is how they managed to squeeze more services into the existing bands! We had quality AND quantity!

As I have already mentioned in the other thread, the majority of programme material exchange due to language (and cultural) considerations is likely to be between Britain and the US, where the primary problem is the difference in frame rate. I've also mentioned the rather poor transfer quality even into the late 1980s and beyond, smeary off-phase video with motion artefacts. So, in this respect, I hardly think our line standard was the main issue.

Lack of colour, yes, mainly on the export side of things.


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Old 24th Feb 2011, 7:13 pm   #34
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It might be pointed out that the change to 625 which Marconi was proposing in the late forties was exactly that; a change of line frequency. System A, but with 625 lines. It was not a proposal to alter any other parameter, and thus nothing more than an increase in definition. It was not what we got with BBC2, which was a change of system, and adopted in the atmosphere of internationalism which was being fostered by various political interests in the confusion that was post-war Europe.
From the point of view of technical progress, abandonment of the pre-war system and adoption of 819 lines was the way forward. Economically, re-instating the existing system was the most immediately viable option. Politics landed us with the worst of both worlds; the expense and inconvenience of change, with only marginal improvement to show for it.
To my mind, 625 was the television industry's equivalent to the Deltic locomotive, which held back main-line electrification by decades.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 7:42 pm   #35
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Cooper View Post
The Russian NIR system seems to have been based, in concept at least, on proposals made by B.W.B. Pethers of the Beeb some time before: he proposed a system known as ART (Additional Reference Transmission), on which some work was done, but never published.
Slightly OT but hopefully, interesting, I too, knew Brian quite well. At the time I worked in BBC telecine he was working on his ART colour system behind the bays in Lime Grove Studio H where 405 colour was being explored in the mid 1960s. He was a very inventive guy and always thought laterally. He died, unfortunately, about 5 years ago. The pictures show what is probably unique and is Brian's ART decoder which I saved from being binned after his death. It is built on an Electrokit? chassis and is completely self contained - and completely useless as there is no coder to go with it!!! I suppose it should go to Bradford - I'll make enquiries. It is an interesting piece of UK TV history. He also developed an anti-flare system for telecines by producing a flare signal using a camera looking at a monitor showing the telecine output through a translucent screen. The signal was then put through a low-pass filter and the result subtracted from the original video - the results were very good but that idea was also not progressed.

On the monochrome standards subject, I pointed my friend Norman Green to this thread - Norman is the recognised expert on the history of EMI and television. His response was:

"a) It was the Hankey Committee set up in 1943 by the War Cabinet to investigate the future of broadcasting who decided on keeping 405 lines. EMI submitted papers on a 1001 line system. It was interesting that 40 years later the problems they encountered were the same that people in 1985 were experiencing!

b) EMI in 1946 was marketing (I have the brochure) a 605 line system which they thought would have plenty of development potential in it!

c) Marconi had not even started 'Badge Engineering' RCA equipment on 405 lines when EMI proposed a 605 line, negative modulation system. This was demonstrated in Australia and New Zealand in 1948."

So it looks like the decision to stay with 405 after the war was completely pragmatic and looked upon as the best way for the UK under the conditions pertaining at the time.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 10:58 pm   #36
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Cossor proposed a 525/50 system for post-war television in the UK.
Max video was 3.1MHz so it could fit into a 5MHz channel.
I believe that it was presented to the 1943 Hankey committee.

An experimental 1029 line system was tried out in Germany in 1939.
I'm sure that real high defintition systems were being tested in many countries. The French were working on a 1000 line system before WW2
All those early attempts at HD TV would not make commercial sense in those times.

TV for the post-war UK? The 405 line system of course. A nice simple system for rapid market expansion. 12million TV licences by 1960.
Anyway, the changeover to 625 went quite smoothly. Most of the 405 only receivers were cleared out by the mid-seventies. My shop opened in the summer of 1972 and I didn't bother to have a VHF TV aerial installed.

DFWB.
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 11:47 pm   #37
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My shop opened in the summer of 1972 and I didn't bother to have a VHF TV aerial installed.

DFWB.
Considering its location, that somehow doesn't surprise me!
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Old 24th Feb 2011, 11:49 pm   #38
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Sticking with 405 in 1946 has to have been the right choice.
Pre-war, one factor initially holding back television was the fear of a change of standard rendering any purchase obsolete. Yes, there were other factors – price of sets being one of them – but by the start of 1939 television began to take off with cheaper sets and a standard that had been committed too ... then war stopped play.

Most of the sets fired up to watch the tv restart in 1946 would have been re-commissioned pre-war sets. New models were few and far between, indeed in the first few months of the service the number of new sets could be counted in the 100’s. Whilst the government authorised more electronic components for the industry than they could ever have used, wood was a scarce and tightly controlled resource. Restarting in 1946 using a different standard would have been pointless if no-one could watch it and with a number of different standards used in the few countries then the concern would be how long til the standard changed yet again ?

So, the only alternative I can see would be to wait a bit before re-starting the service. How long for ? Shortages were such that a number of “new” sets shown at Radiolympia at the end of 1947 still didn’t enter production for a year. This was also a time when countries with a tv service were in the minority, so if you did change standard then which one would you choose ? When the service began to expand to the provinces was there a dominant standard about ? Nope, so presumably that would have been too soon to resume the service too.

Expanding the service beyond London was close to happening just before the war. Choosing a higher bandwidth system would mean either reducing the number of channels – and how they managed to cover the whole uk with just 5 channels is an achievement – or using higher frequencies at a time when the trusty EF50 was all we had.

819-lines would require even higher bandwidth – not going to happen as the channel space wasn’t there, and definitely not going to happen when television design was struggling to economically achieve even a 3.5mc/s bandwidth.

And who needed the extra lines ? The vast majority of sets even in 1950 would have been 9” or 12” models so more lines wouldn’t have bought anything to the party. Hell, there are a few models of the time that struggled even with 405 lines !

405 certainly didn’t hold us back with colour. The Americans dived in the mid 50’s and the principles used work just as well with 405 or, indeed, just about any other number of lines you care to come up with. However, it was too soon as the Americans found out, as it was not until the 60’s that appreciable numbers of colour sets sold, just too darn expensive – and that is “too expensive” for a country that was well off compared to the austerity of the UK. The only complication due to 405 is that the introduction of colour came so close to the introduction of 625 lines and it is to the Pilkington committee’s credit that they resisted 405-line colour as that would have just complicated things. Yes, Andreas Fickers mentions the BBC’s push for 405-line colour but that push was well before the Pilkington report and hardly a surprise since, as Fickers points out, satisfactory colour transmissions had been established by the Beeb in 1957.

At the end of day, I fail to see how the 1946 decision was simply one of “short-term Treasury expediency”, there was no established global standard, no benefit in more lines (other than a mines-bigger-than-yours type flag-waving exercise and an increase in receiver cost) and simply waiting until there was a widespread standard would surely have postponed television for many years and been detrimental for any company wishing to develop television technologies. It’s not the number of lines, simply the decision to stick with an existing standard that was more than good enough for the technologies of the foreseeable future that was the right decision.

TTFN,
Jon
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Old 25th Feb 2011, 3:30 am   #39
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I'm not surprised that some people here are defending the decision on 405/50 - it is, after all, a forum about vintage television, the raison d'etre for it, and something very close to my own heart - but that doesn't mean to say that I am blind to British (or that of any other country's) duff decisions (such as the French 819 system).

Here's another case history: post-war, the Russians went 625/50 and had excellent mass produced sets such as the KVN49 (named for its year). I think that something like 1.3 million (I'd have to check) of these sets were made. I was lucky enough to see one of these, a 1950 model, in a St Petersburg museum a few years ago, still working well with 6 inches of wire in the aerial socket, receiving modern transmissions with very good performance (for the year). The Russians had every reason to hate anything German, but that didn't stop them running with 625/50! That stuck in my mind - if they could 'up sticks' from pre-war, why couldn't we?

The answer is, of course, British Treasury expediency and politics. We were behind the system level technical flow happening around the world - of that there is no doubt - and it is impossible to argue against. However, sticking with 405/50 was a reasonably pragmatic decision to take - for the very short term - but it was wrong for the medium and long term. That tends to be the nature of democratic political control, but that's another argument!

Other countries were building and planning for the future - we were maintaining the past (something that this forum is, of course, about) - not something that a forward looking plan for the 1950s and beyond should really have been considering. As an aside, I would also challenge the ascertion that Marconi wanted 'System A with 625', they wanted negative modulation too. I do have some references on that from 1950. I'd love to know where that one came from!

Sticking with 405/50 was purely and simply a short term, pragmatic, solution, satisfying the Treasury demands, and the short-term political goals to televise the Victory Parade and the 1948 Olympics. This was not unreasonable, but it was not the future - it was the past, even then. 405/50 is often cited as being something that pre-war had 'room to grow', but the reality is that the growth margin had all but been used up by the mid 1950s. 625/50 (and 525/60) took the world much longer to fully exploit, and proved, as Jeffrey B has initimated, to be 'just right'. The forward looking people of Marconi-EMI, the GPO and the BBC only ever regarded 405/50 as a short to medium term option - not something that would still be around decades later, especially not after the greatest leap in electronics technology yet known to mankind following developments in World War II.

We could indeed have waited to re-launch our service - that decision was purely political - especially as the number of sets left from pre-war was tiny (as we know!). Furthermore, I'm not aware of any major public demand for televsion - people had other things to think about! We mortgaged our future success for short-term *results*, short-changed by the Treasury (rightly so - televison was not a priority at that time), and handicapped our longer term prospects. There was no real rush, it could have been done much more carefully and with an eye on the future - not the battles of 1936. 20/20 hindsight again, I'll admit, but no worse than *believing* now that 405/50 was a universal panacea.

It's true that industry coped - but how much better might it have done? That is something that we will never know, especially with the prospect of colour (see the Ficker paper). There is a counter argument, I will concede, that our old-fashioned system stopped, or at least curtailed, imports. But, as we know, such measures are usually counter-productive (as are import tariffs) as your own industry just goes 'soft'. Now, just who else followed our 'lead'? Eire (eventually) and Hong Kong (briefly) - a real vote of confidence in enduring British technology there then!

I do not currently have the time to work through all of the arguments raised point by point with referenced validation and/or critique - but so far nobody on the defensive side has backed up their own claims with any such information. Can any of you? Otherwise it's opinion and speculation against opinion and speculation, which is very bad historical analysis. Technical arguments tend to be weak - solutions to problems will usually be found, if the commercial demand and/or political will exists. For instance, a 'better' EF50 would have soon appeared, if there had been a need. People drive technology, not the other way round. Governments ('people') knew that the medium of television was going to be *big* for decades to come, and that changing standards at a later date would be difficult - did we not realise this? I'm sure that we did, but short-termism ruled. I've heard that one many times about UK policies - haven't you? Continuing 405/50 is just one more example.

It's an interesting thread, this, if very short on hard facts and evidence!

Cheers,

Paul M

PS Looking back on this forum I see that this topic (at least in similar vein) has come up before with no conclusion or hard evidence presented for either opinion before.
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Old 25th Feb 2011, 9:27 am   #40
arjoll
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Default Re: 240, 405 & 625

Quote:
Originally Posted by BGmidsUK View Post
This is worth considering .. had we gone along the 625 route, what impact would that have had on the launch of the ITA service? I very much doubt BBC national coverage could have been achieved (mostly) with Band I alone, meaning Band III would have been used more. This would very likely have forced us onto UHF before the technology was ready (in fact it probably wasn't even when BBC2 was launched!) - or significantly held us back.
Might not be relevant, but New Zealand had three VHF networks pretty much nationwide and a fourth VHF network in main centres, and NZ has used system B from the beginning, PAL since the mid 70's and NICAM since 1989.

There are some small pockets of UHF infill on TV3 in areas like Queenstown (because of terrain there are about 4 or so translators there so VHF was a bit chokka with TV1 and TV2) but for analogue we are predominantly VHF - in fact until the late 80's it was rare to see a TV with a UHF tuner, and UHF aerials were rare in the cities until Sky came along (UHF with Videocrypt, now switched off).
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