01-02-2021, 10:06 AM
The only people who might need a SECAM output these days would be enthusiasts running old French or Soviet bloc sets which were SECAM only. Most of the coder chips, for making PAL/NTSC from digital components, couldn't do SECAM. Presumably because it wasn't a common requirement even a decade or more ago. Remember that most European sets that could receive SECAM could also receive PAL.
c1999 I designed a SECAM output add-on for a client because we though there might be a demand. Never went into production.
When I worked for Michael Cox Electronics in the early 1980s we did quite a bit of SECAM. Mike Cox spoke French fluently (with a very English accent) and loved all things French. It was still a vile colour system. Its only advantages were that you could record it on an unmodified monochrome Quadruplex VTR (soon nullified by the colour versions) and it would survive better on long and mucky distribution links. I'm not sure why the Russians adopted it. Possibly due to not having access to the high technology of colour capable VTRs. Possibly due to very long distribution chains. Possibly due to some French political skulduggery. Or a mixture of all three.
AFAIK, BBC and ITV engineers hated SECAM and would willingly have gone for NTSC, adapted for 625 or even 405 lines. They weren't 100% happy with NTSC but they knew they could make it work well. Then PAL came along just in time.
c1999 I designed a SECAM output add-on for a client because we though there might be a demand. Never went into production.
When I worked for Michael Cox Electronics in the early 1980s we did quite a bit of SECAM. Mike Cox spoke French fluently (with a very English accent) and loved all things French. It was still a vile colour system. Its only advantages were that you could record it on an unmodified monochrome Quadruplex VTR (soon nullified by the colour versions) and it would survive better on long and mucky distribution links. I'm not sure why the Russians adopted it. Possibly due to not having access to the high technology of colour capable VTRs. Possibly due to very long distribution chains. Possibly due to some French political skulduggery. Or a mixture of all three.
AFAIK, BBC and ITV engineers hated SECAM and would willingly have gone for NTSC, adapted for 625 or even 405 lines. They weren't 100% happy with NTSC but they knew they could make it work well. Then PAL came along just in time.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
