A Vision to Behold: The Story of Electronic Displays
It was the decade of disco, but in Australia, it was also of colour television, home computers and movies at home. The centre of this entertainment revolution was the television, Darren Yates writes.
If ever a decade introduced Australian consumers to a new technology revolution, it was the 1970s. Yet despite the world witnessing humans walking on the moon less than six months earlier, the decade started inauspiciously enough – and in Australia, in black-and-white no less. The only entertainment television provided was free-to-air broadcasts and due their unique voltage/power requirements, many new televisions were still driven by electronic valves. However, by the end of the 1970s, Australians would be playing computer games, watching their favourite movies whenever they liked – and doing it all in glorious colour. But not everyone finished the decade a winner.
The Battle for Australian Colour TV Much in the same way WWII delayed television’s arrival in Australia, so too the Vietnam War delayed Australia’s switch to colour TV – as the late Bruce Gyngell put it in a 1998 interview quoting former Prime Minister William McMahon, ‘frankly, [given] the Australian economy, we can’t afford to be in Vietnam and in colour’ (https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/ colour-tv-part-1). Nevertheless, the switch to colour would never be a ‘quick fix’ – the first step was to decide which colour format Australia should adopt.
Colour television began in the U.S. in 1954 and TV manufacturers had been displaying their wares to Australian decision-makers since the early-1960s. However, Australia was in no hurry and would carefully ensure it backed the right horse when choosing our colour TV standard.
The U.S. National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) devised the first colour format, with RCA producing the first colour television in 1954. Unfortunately, NTSC colour suffered from an issue that resulted in subtle colour variations due to the time-delay or ‘phase-shift’ between the colour video signal and the reference ‘subcarrier burst’ signal. Consequently, early NTSC TVs came with a ‘tint’ control to allow the user to correct the colour tone and in technical circles, it gained the moniker ‘Never Twice (the) Same Color’.
Standards of national pride Meanwhile, the French already had the highest resolution in the world, thanks to Henri de France’s 819-TV line masterpiece. Not long after the U.S. began colour transmission, France began work on colour in 1956, formalising the SECAM I colour standard in 1961. SECAM stands for ‘SEquential Colour And Memory’ and it’s said that having the highest TV standard was a source of French pride. But when the European Economic Community in 1963 voted to rationalise TV standards and settle on 625 TV lines for the introduction of colour, SECAM I had to be scrapped. Not surprisingly, the French may have had to accept 625 TV-line resolution, but they certainly weren’t going to cop the colour standard from another country. So, SECAM III became France’s new 625-line colour TV standard in 1965, overcoming the NTSC phase-shift issue.
At the same time, the Germans were also pioneering their own colour TV framework. Engineer Walter Bruch, who had developed the CCIR-B system Australia adopted for our original television standard in 1953, developed a new method to overcome NTSC’s colour phase-error.
In a complex process, an analog broadcast colour TV video signal essentially has the colour information tacked onto a monochrome signal (this
“A key requirement was the need for existing B&W TVs to still work – Australia’s first example of ‘backward-compatibility’. ”
1 The Philips PM5544 test pattern was used by TV manufacturers and TV studios to test colour TV (Image credit: n.v. Philips’ Gloeilampenfabrieken, Eindhoven, the Netherlands)
2 Sony launched the Betamax VCR in May 1975 (Image credit: Public Domain)
3 The Shintom DDV8000 was a very rare double-decked VHS recorder (Image credit: kalleboo, CC BY 2.0).
4 Rank Arena was a major player in the Australian colour TV market (Image credit: Public Domain)
5 Like all TVs of the era, this 1970 European Sony Trinitron features a timber surround frame (Image credit: The Science Musuem UK, CC BY 4.0).
was to allow older black-and-white TVs to remain in service and display the same video in B&W). Bruch figured out that NTSC’s colour phase-shift issue could be largely neutralised by swapping or ‘alternating’ the phase of the colour signal component after each TV line. Bruch’s employer, Telefunken, patented this system in 1962 as ‘Phase Alternation Line’, which became known to all of us as ‘PAL’.
Australia decides
Attempts to create a global colour TV standard in the 1960s failed and by 1966, these three competing systems were in front of Australia’s Postmaster-General, Alan Hulme. Following investigations by the Australian Broadcasting Control Board and its Technical Services Division, then directed by S. F. Brownless, it was announced in February 1969 that Australia would adopt the PAL colour standard.
In reality, it was a bit of a ‘Hobson’s choice’. A key requirement was the need for existing B&W TVs to still work – Australia’s first example of ‘backward-compatibility’. That immediately bumped out a switch to NTSC. The BBC had begun broadcasting colour TV in 1967 using the PAL system – that meant it was readily available, which would further aid in reducing costs. PAL was also more technically advanced than SECAM. Nevertheless, it would still take another six years before Australia switched onto colour television. Indeed, choosing the standard would be a far simpler task than building a local colour television industry.
With the decision made, ABC’s ABN2 station at Gore Hill in Sydney’s north began receiving colour studio monitors in early-1970 (an ABC broadcast technician relayed the story of how staff were able to watch the Apollo 14 moon landing in colour through the studio monitor and their own signal-switching tech built in-house). As the flow of new colour transmission technology continued to roll into the Gore Hill studios over the coming months, then-Prime Minister William McMahon announcing in February 1972 that ‘C-Day’ would be 1 March 1975.
Import tariff cuts overnight
However, McMahon didn’t survive the 1972 federal election and Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party to power for the first time since the 1940s. One of Whitlam’s first acts was to launch a parliamentary inquiry into colour television in late-1972, particularly the issue of tariff protections.
However, the subsequent decision of the Whitlam Government to unilaterally cut import tariffs by 25% overnight on 18 July 1973 caught the business community unaware – there was no consultation, no phase-in period. How you view that decision today really depends in which camp you belong. Some see it as the decision we had to have, with the aim to reduce inflation (14% at the time) and open Australia to global competition and lower prices. Others see it as the beginning of the end for the Australian electronics manufacturing industry, with at least one account claiming that by 1980, employment in Australian manufacturing had fallen by 80,000.
Colour TV industry in Australia Nevertheless, local colour TV manufacturing did begin during the early-1970s, with many famous brands of the era setting up manufacturing and assembly plants. Electronics giant Philips produced colour cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) and complete televisions in its new factory in Clayton, Victoria, while Japanese brand Sanyo set up its own manufacturing base in the border-town of Wodonga. The famed Australian electronics manufacturer
1 Colour TVs started out with just a single aerial input… (Image credit: PantheraLeo 1359531, CC BY 4.0)
2 Inside the JVC Victor HR-3300 VHS VCR, launched in September 1976. The cylindrical helical-scan head block is just above the cassette bay (Image credit: Groink, CC BY-SA 3.0)
3 The Commodore VIC-20 was one of the first home computers to feature composite-video output (Image credit: Public Domain).
4 Philips launched the first consumer VCR, the N1500 series in September 1971 (Public Domain).
Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) teamed up with British TV stalwart Thorn in 1973, producing colour CRTs in its Ashfield factory in Sydney’s inner-west. Then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam opened the new Rank Arena-NEC joint-venture factory in Penrith in Sydney’s west in 1974.
Within the first year of colour TV transmissions, more than 40 colour TV models of all makes were available to consumers and by 1976, Rank Arena had 17% of the local colour TV market.
It couldn’t last
However, despite the glitz and glamour of ‘C-Day’ and the high demand for colour TVs, local manufacturing could not compete with lower-priced imports and it wasn’t long before the factory closures began.
The first to go was the AWA-owned ‘Amalgamated Wireless Valve’ factory in Ashfield. It ceased making TVs in late-1975, with AWA-Thorn TVs soon imported from Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric. By 1984, Mitsubishi Electric had taken over the AWA-Thorn venture and today, AWA is an ICT services company.
Philips expanded the Clayton factory in 1979, but would cease making TVs and eventually sell the factory to Hoover in the mid-1980s (Hoover made ‘Admiral’ fridges there). Meanwhile, the Sanyo Wodonga factory assembled some 350,000 colour TVs within its first ten years, but by 1987, this factory, too, had closed doors.
Other famous Australian brands such as Healing and Kriesler would disappear altogether by 1980.
However, the Rank Arena-NEC factory opened by Gough Whitlam managed to survive, changing hands over the years until its final owners, Panasonic AVC Networks, could no longer compete with booming LCD and plasma TV imports. The Penrith factory, Australia’s last local TV factory, closed in March 2006.
Some argue that global economic conditions at the time contributed more to the decline in Australian electronics manufacturing than the tariff reductions, although few who worked in the factories would agree. Many who voice their opinions
“Despite the glitz and glamour of ‘C-Day’ and the high demand for colour TVs, local manufacturing could not compete with lower- priced imports and it wasn’t long before the factory closures began.”
online are not shy as to where the blame lies. The reality is almost certainly that if the tariff cuts didn’t contribute, then they definitely didn’t help.
Watch movies any time
What made the 1970s unique was the intersection of technologies that all reached maturity at more or less the same time. Television had been around for near on 50 years, yet the idea you could do anything else with it, apart from watching free-to-air broadcasts, still hadn’t reached criticalmass.
While the first video recorder made its mark in 1956, huge reels of two-inch (5cm) wide video tape weren’t exactly ‘consumerfriendly’.
In 1963, Philips had solved the similar issue for audio-tape with the release of the ‘compact cassette’ and in 1972, it launched what is considered the world’s first ‘successful’ video cassette recorder (VCR) in the N1500 series. With mechanical piano-style function keys, wooden side panels and mechanical clock/timer, there was room for improvement, which Philips achieved in the next few years. Yet, the N1500’s success was moderate and couldn’t survive the Sony/JVC onslaught to come.
That onslaught began in 1975 with the launch of the Sony Betamax, followed closely by the JVC ‘VHS’ (Video Home System) in September 1976. With no compatibility between them, the VCR ‘format war’ had begun.
There are numerous reasons why Sony and JVC both had huge success with their respective VCRs (yes, Betamax was a success – Sony shipped in excess of 18 million, not including the professional ‘Betacam’ spin-offs). First, Sony and JVC had Philips to pave the way and kick-start interest, giving Sony and JVC a head-start. Second, the first decks operated like audio cassette decks – building on that familiarity lowered the barrier to entry. On top of that, both video-cassette formats looked just like an oversized audio cassette – again, familiarity. Throw in up to three hours’ recording time and you could fit almost any movie with ads onto one tape (by contrast, the N1500 maxed out at 60 minutes’ recording time with the initial models).
But the most valuable features were the built-in tuner and RF modulator – with virtually all consumer TVs only featuring a single aerial input, adding a built-in TV tuner meant users could record independent of the TV and the RFmodulator meant their lone aerial input could still receive free-to-air broadcasts, but also view their tapes by turning to the appropriate VHF channel (typically 0 or 1). This would be a path followed by the next home entertainment revolution.
The Home Computer
We’ve covered Australia’s pioneering role in home computers in a previous series, but even those halcyon days of 1977 didn’t actually change things for Australian lounge-rooms. The Commodore PET, the Apple II and Tandy TRS80 Model I were all sold with their own monitors and it wasn’t until the arrival of what you might call the ‘second-generation’ of home computers in the Tandy TRS-80 Colour Computer, TI 99/4 and the Commodore VIC-20 between 1979 and 1981 that plugging a computer into your television became more common-place.
The aerial input was still the only port on TVs of the era and it wasn’t until computer makers produced PAL-standard RF modulators that Australia could enjoy the home computer revolution.
However, with only the single RF/aerial input, your TV now required you to swap cables between your VCR and home computer every time you wanted to change over.
Manufacturers soon supplied aerial switching boxes, however, local RFmodulated video quality wasn’t as good as free-to-air TV, but given the low-resolution output of home computers at the time, it was good enough. It wasn’t until the 1980s that TV manufacturers began to catch up and offered a composite-video input. These ports were highly coveted (at least in our house). In fact, if your computer had a composite-video output, you could plug that into your VCR’s composite-input and connect the VCR’s composite-output to the TV’s composite-in port, essentially ‘daisy-chaining’ it all together. You had to ‘double-shuffle’ remotes with your VCR and TV, but it meant no more diving behind the TV to find the right cables.
The search for quality
By decade’s end, VCRs and home computers had given consumers an appetite not just for more inputs, but for better image quality. RF-modulated video and composite-video both suffered to varying extents from the fact that they combined the luminance (the ‘brightness’ component of the video) with the chrominance (or ‘colour’) part and were known as ‘two-wire’ systems. Professional video had long separated these two components to enjoy higher video quality.
In 1979, the Atari 800 home computer became the first model to offer separate chroma and luminance video signals. However, with no consumer TV at the time having the option to accept the separate signals, little was initially made of it. Nevertheless, the next two decades would be an endless march towards ever improving port options, audio quality and image definition.
Next time
We gate-crash the 1980s and 90s, the era that cemented colour television as the home entertainment centre of the universe. From the PC to DVD and the first plasma and LCD televisions, it was the era when the audience took control. See you then.