Electronics: Incompatibly Split

It was the kind of ruckus that Pa Cartwright almost routinely settles every week on U.S. color TV. Europeans, who don’t see Bonanza or anything else in color, have been feudin’ for more than a year over which of two color systems to adopt—and now they have decided on a permanent split into hostile camps.

The competing systems are France’s SECAM (for Séquence de Couleurs avec Mémoire—color sequence with memory) and West Germany’s PAL (for phase alternating line). They are, of course, incompatible.

During his recent trip to Moscow, Charles de Gaulle talked to the Kremlin about adopting SECAM for Russia. By last week the Soviets had agreed to go ahead with SECAM and nine East European Communist nations promptly fell into line. At an Oslo meeting of the International Consultative Conference on Radio Communications last month, Greece and Monaco also opted for SECAM, giving it a 16-nation lineup. Twelve Western European countries, including the United Kingdom, chose PAL, while Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain remained undecided.

Neither SECAM nor PAL will be ready for any sort of full-scale operation until the fall of 1967. In fact, France’s only going color setup is a closed-circuit link between the paddock and the betting windows at Longchamp race track. That made even more apropos the remark of French Information Minister Alain Peyrefitte, who claimed that France, in the hope of Europe-wide agreement, had so far been holding back its color TV industry “like horses at the starting gate.” Said Peyrefitte: “Now we’re telling them to go.”