Re: Who remembers how bad analogue television was?

On 2/27/25 12:45 PM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 27/02/2025 19:58, KevinJ93 wrote:

On 2/26/25 8:52 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:

<...>

>
Are you sure that 1984 date is correct? By 1970 in the UK colour TVs used transistor signal processing stages and many had already changed to transistors for the power stages such as line and frame output as well as using chopper stabilised power supplies.

 The first two colour TVs I recall owned by friends or family were about the time of Apollo 8 in 1968. Memorable for the Earth rise shot. Both were entirely valves and my uncle's caught fire leaving a nasty brown burn mark on their wool carpet and smoke damage on the ceiling.
 The earliest was at a school friends house and was in pastel shades pre Nd glass. It was in colour but only just... Joe 90 launch was the first programme I can recall watching there in colour. Test cards in shops don't count.
 I'd believe 1974 as a date for hybrid colour TVs that almost worked correctly and didn't need a service engineer visiting them every other week. By 1980 I'm pretty sure they were almost entirely semiconductor based.

My father bought a Ferguson 19" colour TV at the end of 1970 that was fully semiconductor (it was my first term at university and he got it just before I came back for Christmas). It seemed to work fairly well - he would tinker with it but I don't remember it needing any significant repair. I gather it was one of the first such sets.
The set in the common room at university was an older valve based one with no blue channel but it was surprisingly watchable and it didn't stop all the students filling the room to bursting point when Top of the Pops was on on Thursday night.
https://oldtechnology.net/colour.html#ferguson3703