Old NTSC tricks: 240p?

[tony duell]

> 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