Re: Who remembers how bad analogue television was?

On 27/02/2025 3:52 pm, Sylvia Else wrote:

Leave aside the ghosting, which could largely be addressed by having a decent antenna.

It always struck me as fine. We were late getting it in Northern Tasmania - the first transmissions that made it were from the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, and the only people who bought sets were mad optimists because the signal vary rarely made it across Bass Strait.
I didn't get to see it much until I started my university studies in Melbourne in 1960 when there was a TV in my residential college.
It was a PAL system - pretty much the UK-German system

But my memory of a Philips Colour TV (1984ish) was that it had rubbish automatic gain control (AGC), and odd interactions between brightness and picture position.

By 1976 I was working at EMI Central Research (where Alan Dower Blumlein had pretty much invented television in the late 1930s, and my boss had been involved in the legal dispute between RCA and EMI about whose patents had priority - RCA won mainly because the US court didn't want to see that quadrature decoding was was the same thing as sine-cosine decoding). I never owned a home TV - but when I got married in 1979 my wife insisted that we buy one, and it worked fine.
By then I knew exactly what it was doing. At Cambridge Instrument we used standard consumer TV tubes as displays for our scanning electron microscope - we'd buy a couple of hundred out of a commercial batch, and bodge the cabinets to accommodate that batch. The next batch was always a slightly different shape, and the sheet metal shop could always adjust the cabinet to accommodate the new batch.
For a while we generated a 624-line display - a timing PROM had gotten corrupted. One of the other engineers eventually worked out that the timing was wrong and I worked out how the PROM had been intended to be programmed.

Were studio monitors any better, anyone know?

TV based visual displays could be remarkably good. Cambridge Instruments offered a photo-monitor which presented a slow 4000 line display - intended to show slow high-resolution scans to be recorded on photographic film for publication. They used very special tubes with the inner surface metalised to provide electrostatic screening. A batch came in where the metal layer didn't look shiny and they almost worked ...
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Bill Sloman, Sydney