Almost everything about the metric system mention above is more about familiarity, or lack there of, in the USA.
Measuring with an electronic scale is so much more convenient. I can place a bowl on a scale, zero the scale and measure any additional ingredients, including water based liquid without any complications or needing to get scoops or jugs.
My food processor has a built in scales, so all I have to do is hit zero and I can add any extra ingredients very easily.
Inches and feet? Don’t really see what the advantage is? You tend to just think in centimetres: I intuitively know what 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 cm looks like without having to measure anything. A typical door here is exactly 2 meters, I’m about 193cm. Everything else is worked from that.
I know what a kg feels like - it’s a litre of milk. So my intuitive reference is that. Same with smaller amounts like a half kg is a bag of sugar. I would know roughly what 100g, 250g etc feel like without weighing anything.
Then things like temperature - it’s what you’re used to. I’ve no intuitive feel for °F but I could probably tell you it was 23°C and not 25°C today or that a hot shower is just under 40°C.
We are also probably more used to using technical units than Americans (in the USA anyway). You’ll always set washing machines, dishwashers and so on by numerical temp references. Not just warm, hot, cold. Also things like showers incredibly have temperatures set numerically on the dial / knob. So you just become familiar with them.
As for the reference to standards of things being different in different countries. That’s a failure of harmonisation and standardisation. It’s absolutely nothing to do with SI.
Industry standards are set by national bodies or industry bodies and things evolve to a particular set of norms.
That’s precisely why the be EU and European standards bodies spent so much time and effort on harmonisation of standards in Europe since the 1950s. It’s what has made the single market function. Otherwise you would have endless variations of devices and standards that were slightly incompatible with others.
As for PAL, SECAM and NTSC (all dead standards now) - their origins were driven by technical and commercial factors. Colour systems had to be overlaid on previous monochrome systems, which had different signal characteristics, differing numbers of lines, bandwidth, channel spacing, audio subcarriers and so on due to where and when they originated.
NTSC colour also launched quite a bit earlier. European research having been seriously delayed by the economic fallout of WWII.
By the time European TV companies and vendors of broadcast equipment began to look at colour switchover, they also had an opportunity to improve on NTSC, which had flaws, particularly with maintaining hue accuracy. PAL essentially fixed colour accuracy using error checking / cancellation using phase alternating lines, which was a technical solution developed in Germany before WWII.
SECAM’s delay line (memory), or at least something somewhat inspired by it, got incorporated into more advanced PAL decoders later on, which improved PAL colour accuracy further.
Early Sony PAL TVs wouldn’t pay the licence to Telefunken for the PAL technology, so essentially converted PAL to 625 line NTSC internally for the first few years of Sony colour TVs in Europe:
As for the frame rate / field rate - it’s linked to the mains frequency. This is both because it was a handy reference and also because TV cameras and screens had to strobe in compatibility wiring mains powered lighting to avoid visual effects.
Later PAL TVs increased the refresh rate to 100Hz + using digital processing to increase the frame rate.
Then you also had extensions to PAL using digital components to provide PALplus, a widescreen format that lasted until the introduction of digital tv and NICAM stereo, which used a protocol that resembles ISDN somewhat to carry CD quality digital stereo or two language tracks in mono. There was also a competing German Zweikanalton (A2) analogue stereo system which was basically just an FM stereo subcarrier. NICAM was also used with SECAM in France.
Btw SECAM was really never used in production. French TV stations typically shot and produced using PAL and then broadcast in SECAM. Although, studio editing. It was less than ideal for video editing and mixing, which was a major reason it never really extended beyond broadcast. As a broadcast standard SECAM performed quite nicely. It was very colour accurate, but tended to behave differently to PAL in a bad signal. PAL would tend to drop colour. SECAM could sometimes drop one or two colours and you’d get a “SECAM fire” where it could start missing one or more of R G or B. Bear in mind SECAM transmitted the colour information sequentially, using delay lines, PAL and NTSC both combined them. So, if you screw up signals on SECAM you can get colour tv with odd colours, the other two will tend to go into monochrome.
That being said, you don’t typically edit and mix using composite signals anyway: it was usually done with component video, RGB and audio kept separate and then you broadcast in composite like NTSC, PAL or SECAM.
Serious drama production was still shot to film well into the 1980s and 90s until serious digital formats arrived. If you look at say Star Trek TNG, that was all shot to film. Cheaper productions were shot to analogue tape - sitcoms and so on. Analogue, electronic editing and vision mixing tended to remain fairly unsophisticated in TV until non linear, digital production anyway.
Overall, watching PAL or SECAM looked exactly the same and both had higher resolution and colour accuracy than NTSC, but a lower frame rate - which isn’t actually noticeable tbh. A lot of what you’ll see online is people shooting a PAL screen with a camera that sees a strobe because it’s scanning at 30 FPS instead of 25. In reality, PAL or SECAM screens didn’t flicker and later TVs double or even more than double the refresh rate.
France actually had 819 line HD television as it’s monochrome standard after WWII. It looked fantastic but they moved to standard 625 line based systems for practical reasons when colour was introduced. The bandwidth of 819 line SECAM was just too high.
The other addition to European TV was Teletext, a digital information system carried on a hidden line. It basically carried several hundred pages of text and special chars which could be used to build basic graphics. You’d 900 or so numbered pages and you jumped around using either page numbers or 4 colour coded hot link buttons on the remote.
Teletext was developed initially by Philips Electronics’ CAL laboratories and pitched to U.K. tv stations in the early 70s and from there evolved into a EBU adopted standard. There was, of course, a competing French system, which used similar technology to Minitel, but subsequently fell away to the EBU standards.
Teletext lasted from the early 1970s until the end of analogue TV and has modern replacements in digital tv systems.
It was a very successful service and probably one of the first mass market digital platforms for news and information, entertainment etc.
Each TV channel carried its own teletext service, some were very comprehensive magazines. Others were just TV guides and silly stuff, but they were often used to provide extra information to go along side shows - recipes, competitions, sports results etc etc
Page 888 was usually used to do live subtitling / closed captioning. So you just hit text and 888 and that’s how you watched with subtitles on analogue tv.
European TV systems tend to be developed by commercial companies but with the view to creating open standards that are harmonised by the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), famous for the Eurovision.
The current batch of EBU broadcasting standards are known as DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) which comes in a variety of variants DVB-T (terrestrial) DVB-S (satellite), DVB-C (cable) etc. They evolve and maintain a concept of backwards compatibility and also extensibility. The fact they’re an open set or standards, a bit like the way the GSM family of standards works in the mobile phone world, they have tended to become global standards. So DVB is by far and away the most widespread tv transmission system in the world.
[this post was last edited: 6/28/2020-09:29]
