I’ve Seen Alligator Shoes, But Never An Alligator Camera…Till Now!
On May 9, 2014
- TV History
You won’t believe the paint job on these 1947 French cameras! The build is pretty interesting too! Notice that the viewfinder is built into the pedestal column. Thanks to Brock Whaley in Ireland for sending this.
The 819 line channels took up 14 MHz of bandwidth. And that with AM sound. Their VHF channels were not adjacent, but overlapped in frequency. 14 MHz of I.F. bandwidth made a home receiver very expensive. Six or seven stages of I.F. amps were not uncommon. The audio from the former French channel 2 (41-55 MHz) was often heard by me in Florida during the sunspot maximum of the 1970’s, along with sound from 405 line BBC-1.
Obviously, not an RCA turnkey operation.
Work on SECAM began in 1956. The technology was ready by the end of the fifties, but this was too soon for a wide introduction. Initially, a version of SECAM for the French 819-line television standard was devised and tested, but not introduced. Following a pan-European agreement to introduce color TV only in 625 lines, France had to start the conversion by switching over to a 625-line television standard, which happened at the beginning of the 1960s with the introduction of a second network.
Exactly Brock. 819 lines at a rate of 25 fps. ( 220 volts 50 hertz )
France decided to go with 819 lines a year later.
definitely the strangest cameras I’ve ever seen!