819-line was an
analog
Analog or analogue may refer to:
Computing and electronics
* Analog signal, in which information is encoded in a continuous variable
** Analog device, an apparatus that operates on analog signals
*** Analog electronics, circuits which use analog ...
monochrome TV system developed and used in
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
as television broadcast resumed after
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. Transmissions started in 1949 and were active up to 1985, although limited to France,
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
and
Luxembourg
Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...
.
It is associated with
CCIR System E
CCIR System E is an analog broadcast television system used in France and Monaco, associated with monochrome 819-line high resolution broadcasts. Transmissions started in 1949 and ended in 1985.
System E specifications
Some of the important s ...
and
F.
History
When Europe resumed TV transmissions after World War II (i.e. in the late 1940s and early 1950s) most countries standardized on
625-line 625-lines is a standard-definition television resolution used mainly in the context of analog systems. It was first demonstrated by Mark Iosifovich Krivosheev in 1948.
Analog broadcast television standards
The following International Telecommuni ...
television systems. The two exceptions were the British
405-line system, which had already been introduced in 1936, and the French 819-line system. During the 1940s
René Barthélemy
René Barthélemy (10 March 1889 – 12 February 1954) was a French engineer and a pioneer in the development of television.
Background
The invention of television was a slow enterprise of collective improvement between researchers and do-it- ...
had already reached 1,015 lines
and even 1,042 lines.
On November 20, 1948,
François Mitterrand
François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand (26 October 19168 January 1996) was President of France, serving under that position from 1981 to 1995, the longest time in office in the history of France. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party, he ...
, the then Secretary of State for Information, decreed a broadcast standard of 819 lines developed by
Henri de France
Henri Georges de France (7 September 1911 Paris – 29 April 1986 Paris) was a pioneering French television inventor. His inventions include the 819 line French standard and the SECAM color system. He was also apparently behind the HD-MAC high ...
;
broadcasting began at the end of 1949 in this higher definition format. It was used in France by
TF1, and in
Monaco
Monaco (; ), officially the Principality of Monaco (french: Principauté de Monaco; Ligurian: ; oc, Principat de Mónegue), is a sovereign city-state and microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Italian region of Lig ...
by
Tele Monte Carlo.
Some 819-line TV sets were available, like the ''Grammont 504-A-31'' from 1951 and the ''
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...
14TX100'' multi-standard 625/819-line TV from 1952
The system was also adopted (with limited bandwidth, affecting image resolution) in 1953 in Belgium
by ''
RTB'' and in 1955 in Luxembourg by ''
Télé-Luxembourg
RTL9 is a French-language Luxembourgish television channel shown in Luxembourg, France, Monaco, Africa and the French-speaking regions of Switzerland.
History of the channel
Télé-Luxembourg
On 1 July 1954, CLR (Compagnie Luxembourgeoise ...
''.
Broadcasts were discontinued in Belgium in February 1968, and in Luxembourg in September 1971. Despite some attempts to create a color
SECAM
SECAM, also written SÉCAM (, ''Séquentiel de couleur à mémoire'', French for ''color sequential with memory''), is an analog color television system that was used in France, some parts of Europe and Africa, and Russia. It was one of th ...
version of the 819-line system,
France gradually abandoned the system in favor of the Europe-wide standard of
625-lines with the final 819-line transmissions taking place in Paris from the
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower ( ; french: links=yes, tour Eiffel ) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.
Locally nicknamed "'' ...
on 19 July 1983.
Tele Monte Carlo in Monaco were the last broadcasters to transmit 819-line television, closing down their transmitter in 1985.
Technical details
This was arguably the world's first
high-definition television system
High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...
, and, by today's standards, it could be called 736i (as it had 737 lines active, but one of the lines was composed of 2 halves) with a maximum theoretical resolution of 408×368
line pairs (which in digital terms can be expressed as broadly equivalent to 816×736 pixels) with a 4:3 aspect ratio. By comparison with modern digital standards,
720p
720p (1280×720 px; also called HD ready, standard HD or just HD) is a progressive HDTV signal format with 720 horizontal lines/1280 columns and an aspect ratio (AR) of 16:9, normally known as widescreen HDTV (1.78:1). All major HDTV broadcast ...
is 1,280×720 pixels, of which the 4:3 portion would be 960×720 pixels, while
PAL DVDs have a resolution of 720×576 pixels.
The
testcards used with the system had resolution gratings the went up to 900
TV lines
Television lines (TVL) is a specification of an analog camera or monitor's horizontal image resolution. The TVL is one of the most important resolution measures in a video system. The TVL can be measured with the standard EIA 1956 resolution cha ...
. However, the theoretical picture quality far exceeded the capabilities of the analogue equipment of its time, and each 819-line channel occupied a wide 14
MHz
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...
of
VHF bandwidth.
General technical specifications of the
broadcast television systems
Broadcast television systems (or terrestrial television systems outside the US and Canada) are the encoding or formatting systems for the transmission and reception of terrestrial television signals.
Analog television systems were standardized by ...
used with 819-lines.
819-lines were broadcast using two systems: System E and F.
System E
System E implementation provided very good (near
HDTV
High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...
) picture quality but with an uneconomical use of bandwidth; a 625/50 signal providing the same clarity as an 819-line image, but matted down 4:3 with the same number of lines, would still need nearly 6 MHz for the vision carrier alone (vs typical 5 to 6 MHz in actual use), and 5 MHz for 525/60 (vs typical 4.2 MHz), although a 405/50 transmission could get away with only 2.5 MHz (typical ''3 MHz'', as
System A made no allowance for the
Kell factor
The Kell factor, named after RCA engineer Raymond D. Kell, is a parameter used to limit the bandwidth of a sampled image signal to avoid the appearance of beat frequency patterns when displaying the image in a discrete display device, usually t ...
and thus had a "narrow pixel"/"tall line" appearance). Thus even an unusually crisp "standard" definition (or slightly soft 405-line) image only needed half, or even one-quarter the vision bandwidth of the 819-line system to give a "balanced" appearance, despite their lower overall resolution still seeming perfectly clear on the more affordable small-screen receivers often used in the pre-color era. With the usual additions of sound carrier and vestigial sideband the result was a combined signal that demanded approximately two to three times the bandwidth of more moderately specified standards, even when colour was added to them (as the color subcarrier resides ''within'' the luma signal space).
System E
television channel
A television channel is a terrestrial frequency or virtual number over which a television station or television network is distributed. For example, in North America, "channel 2" refers to the terrestrial or cable band of 54 to 60 MHz, with ...
s were arranged as follows:
System F
System F
System F (also polymorphic lambda calculus or second-order lambda calculus) is a typed lambda calculus that introduces, to simply typed lambda calculus, a mechanism of universal quantification over types. System F formalizes parametric polymorph ...
was an adapted 819-line system used in Belgium and Luxembourg as an answer to the bandwidth problem, using only half the original vision bandwidth and approximately half the sound carrier offset. It allowed French 819-line programming to squeeze into the 7 MHz VHF broadcast channels used in those neighboring countries,
albeit with a substantial loss of horizontal resolution (408×737 effective); although this still offered approximately twice the actual clarity of 405-line System A (twice the lines, roughly the same horizontal definition), the contrast between vertical and horizontal resolution would have made it seem perceptually worse. Use of System F was discontinued in Belgium in February 1968, and in Luxembourg in September 1971.
Between 1976 and 1981 when French channel TF1 was switching area by area to the new analog 625-lines UHF network with SECAM colour, some transmitters and gapfillers broadcast the 819-line signal in UHF.
[TDF:situation des émetteurs au 31 December 1980] When switching to 625-lines, most gapfillers did not change UHF channel (e.g. many gapfillers using this transmission located in
French Alps
The French Alps are the portions of the Alps mountain range that stand within France, located in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur regions. While some of the ranges of the French Alps are entirely in France, others, such as ...
near
Grenoble
lat, Gratianopolis
, commune status = Prefecture and commune
, image = Panorama grenoble.png
, image size =
, caption = From upper left: Panorama of the city, Grenoble’s cable cars, place Saint- ...
,
Mont Salève and
Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
began broadcasting on UHF channel 42, and continue to use this frequency to this day). They were switched to 625-lines in June 1981.
References
See also
*
CCIR System E
CCIR System E is an analog broadcast television system used in France and Monaco, associated with monochrome 819-line high resolution broadcasts. Transmissions started in 1949 and ended in 1985.
System E specifications
Some of the important s ...
*
CCIR System F
Comité consultatif international pour la radio, CCIR System E is an Analog television, analog broadcast television system used in France and Monaco, associated with monochrome 819-line high resolution broadcasts. Transmissions started in 1949 and ...
{{Analogue TV transmitter topics
Television technology
History of television