Another one for PAL People Always Lavender
Or 'Pay another licence' (refering to, I believe, a royalty payment to sell a true
PAL decoder).
Sony sold a TV set in the UK which avoided this by essentially treating PAL as NTSC and
only
decoding every other line of colour or something. I have the service information in one of
my
boxes of books.
Apparently in the early days of colour TV (I do not know which system) they were doing
closed-
circuit tests. The camera was pointed at a known test subject, the image on the monitor
was
inspected and things were tweaked so it looked OK. One of the test subjects was a still
life of
a bowl of fruit. One day they just could not get a reasonable colour image no matter how
much
they fiddled with the phase shift controls, etc. And then somebody had the sense to look
at the
subject. Some joker had painted the banana blue...
-tony