21 Facts About SECAM

SECAM, written SECAM, is an analog color television system first used in France.

SECAM video is composite video because the luminance and chrominance are transmitted together as one signal.

All the countries using SECAM are currently in the process of conversion, or have already converted to Digital Video Broadcasting, the new pan-European standard for digital television.

Development of SECAM predates PAL, and began in 1956 by a team led by Henri de France working at Compagnie Francaise de Television .

Nonetheless, SECAM was partly developed for reasons of national pride.

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SECAM IV was proposed by France and USSR at the 1966 Oslo CCIR conference and demonstrated in London.

SECAM was inaugurated in France on 1 October 1967, on la deuxieme chaine, now called France 2.

SECAM was adopted by former French and Belgian colonies in Africa, as well as Greece, Cyprus, and Eastern Bloc countries and some Middle Eastern countries.

Yet SECAM remained in use in Russia, Belarus and the French-speaking African countries.

Just as with the other color standards adopted for broadcast usage over the world, SECAM is a standard that permits existing monochrome television receivers predating its introduction to continue to be operated as monochrome televisions.

SECAM thus had the added issue of having to be compatible both with their existing 819-line system as well as their future broadcasts on the 625-line system.

SECAM colorimetry was similar to PAL, as defined by the ITU on REC-BT.

SECAM uses frequency modulation to encode chrominance information on the color carrier, which does not require knowledge of the carrier phase to demodulate.

Color difference signals in SECAM are calculated in the YDbDr color space, which is a scaled version of the YUV color space.

FM modulation of the color information allows SECAM to be completely free of the dot crawl problem commonly encountered with the other analog standards.

SECAM transmissions are more robust over longer distances than NTSC or PAL.

FM SECAM is a continuous spectrum, so unlike PAL and NTSC even a perfect digital comb filter could not entirely separate SECAM colour and luminance signals.

MESECAM is a method of recording SECAM color signals onto VHS or Betamax video tape.

At a later stage, countries where both PAL and SECAM signals were available, such as the USSR, developed a cheap method of converting PAL video machines to record SECAM signals using the PAL circuitry.

The VHS specification for "native" SECAM recording specifies that they be divided by 4 on recording to give sub carriers of approximately 1.

Many PAL VHS recorders, with MESECAM, have had their analog tuner modified in French-speaking western Switzerland .