It's why I said "here". I know that in the UK they sold color TV without A/V input up to 2003 at least
But in France, nobody cared about providing SECAM L RF output. And in fact, nobody but a few brands cared about providing SECAM A/V devices after the mid 90's.
It's mostly because by law, all color TV sold after 1981 (and up to 2016) must have a SCART input. Or at least a video input (in theory, every TV should have one, but apparently no one cared to enforce that law for black and white TVs).
The last SECAM RF console were the Intellivision and Atari 2600 Jr (the Colecovision was RGB, the NES was PAL to RGB, the 7800 was PAL to RGB).
French Commodore importer sold SECAM C64, but they were replaced by RGB models rapidly that kept the PAL RF output, not a SECAM one. Atari computers were PAL, not SECAM, etc.
VCR stopped including an RF out modulator around 1995 yeah, you had to use a SCART cable.
Only ONE Digital TV tuner had a SECAM L output when they were released around 2005, and the quality was astoundingly low, barely useable.
Several digital tuner had SECAM options but most of them were of poor quality with heavy "SECAM fire" on it (for an A/V connection, it tell you how poor the quality was).
The last decent SECAM device I saw was a Samsung DVD player, the DVD 909, that could be set up for SECAM, PAL and NTSC... but since it also had RGB SCART out I only used it to see how it looked. And that was in 2002.
And you might say "But SECAM doesn't matter for black and white" and you'd be right. Except that SECAM L/L' is unlike every other TV system in the world. It's not SECAM color encoding at fault; if you take a TV set from Eastern Europe or overseas France, that used SECAM, and try to tune on PAL signals, you will get a black and white picture and sound.
But with French L/L' system, it's a different system.
It's based on older video standard that were used in the 1930's, so it's incompatible with all other
RF video standards. System L use positive video modulation, all other use negative.
System L use AM sound, all other use FM sound (which provide an interesting thing : when you are out of tune on a channel, or on a blank channel, you know that familiar hissing sound? On French TV, it doesnt' exist. We don't get hissing because of the AM sound, somehow.)
Because of those technical considerations, devices sold in France were converted to RGB, to SECAM A/V for older ones, and RF was dropped out very fast.
By the mid 90's most TV were multistandards anyway so new generation consoles (SNES, Megadrive II and all later systems) were PAL. (yes, on the French NES, there is no composite output, and neither there is on the Frnech Master System and Megadrive I. The composite chips were totally removed, so if you had a SCART color TV BUT it was one of those rare that didn't had RGB, then you only had a dark screen.)
Topic: Philips TF 2403 - old consoles need old TVs (Read 1074 times)
