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Endpoint: SECAM (French)



created on: 1/09/2021
by: Lo55o (12470)
 
 

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SECAM, also written SÉCAM (séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for sequential colour with memory), is an analog color television system first used in France. It was one of three major analog color television standards, the others being PAL and NTSC.

All the countries using SECAM are currently in the process of conversion, or have already converted to Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), the new pan-European standard for digital television. SECAM remained a major standard into the 2000s.

Development of SECAM began in 1956 by a team led by Henri de France working at Compagnie Française de Télévision (later bought by Thomson, now Technicolor). The technology was ready by the end of the 1950s, but this was too soon for a wide introduction. 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.

The first proposed system was called SECAM I in 1961, followed by other studies to improve compatibility and image quality.

These improvements were called SECAM II and SECAM III, with the latter being presented at the 1965 CCIR General Assembly in Vienna.

Further improvements were SECAM III A followed by SECAM III B, the adopted system for general use in 1967, and first SECAM broadcast was made in France that year.

Soviet technicians were involved in the development of the standard, and created their own incompatible variant called NIIR or SECAM IV, which was not deployed. The team was working in Moscow's Telecentrum under the direction of Professor Shmakov. The NIIR designation comes from the name of the Nautchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Radio (NIIR), a Soviet research institute involved in the studies. Two standards were developed: Non-linear NIIR, in which a process analogous to gamma correction is used, and Linear NIIR or SECAM IV that omits this process.

SECAM was inaugurated in France on 1 October 1967, on la deuxième chaîne (the second channel), now called France 2. A group of four suited men—a presenter (Georges Gorse, Minister of Information) and three contributors to the system's development—were shown standing in a studio. Following a count from 10, at 2:15 pm the black-and-white image switched to color; the presenter then declared "Et voici la couleur !" (fr: And here is color!) In 1967, CLT of Lebanon became the third television station in the world, after the Soviet Union and France, to broadcast in color utilizing the French SECAM technology.

The first color television sets cost 5000 Francs. Color TV was not very popular initially; only about 1500 people watched the inaugural program in color. A year later, only 200,000 sets had been sold of an expected million. This pattern was similar to the earlier slow build-up of color television popularity in the US.

SECAM was later adopted by former French and Belgian colonies, Greece, Cyprus, the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries (except for Romania), and some Middle Eastern countries. However, with the fall of communism, and following a period when multi-standard TV sets became a commodity, many Eastern European countries decided to switch to the West German-developed PAL system.

Other countries, notably the United Kingdom and Italy, briefly experimented with SECAM before opting for PAL.

Since late 2000s, SECAM is in the process of being phased out and replaced by DVB.
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Submitted by : Lo55o (12470)
on : 01/09/2021
Refined by : bob (9179)
Last updated on: 20/09/2022