Standard time!

[Uncle Al]

Carl,

Try this site for the Pioneer Laser Disc Players and this site
for FREE Mitsubishi service manuals and/or schematics.

Hope this info helps

Uncle Al

[crfriend]

[...]Pioneer Laser Disc Players[...]

Oh my. HeNe lasers in consumer gear. Who'd have thunk it!

I recall HeNe lasers from a previous gig I had as a field engineer and had a couple of Xerographic printers that used them as the exciters. Fun bits indeed. Those things would shoot a nice tight beam all the way across a valley that'd be visible from 3/4 of a mile.

Hint: Do not look into laser beam with remaining good eye.

[kingfish]

PLEASE bring back plain old NTSC!)

Hear! Hear!

At least with NTSC, if the signal was weak, you still had a signal and the option of suffering through a snowy picture.
With the new digital standard(s), your picture may be perfect, but if that signal gets weak, you get no picture.

[skirted_in_SF]

PLEASE bring back plain old NTSC!)

Hear! Hear!

At least with NTSC, if the signal was weak, you still had a signal and the option of suffering through a snowy picture.
With the new digital standard(s), your picture may be perfect, but if that signal gets weak, you get no picture.

I can see the broadcast tower from where I live in SF. With an analog(ue) signal I was plagued with ghosts with the rabbit ears I use for reception. (the Marin Headlands are a couple of miles and 180 degrees from the tower). I don't watch much TV, but my local PBS station was showing a Nova program on cosmology. Obviously made in highdef, and the picture on my relatively new Sony LCD screen was outstanding. All this with the same set of rabbit ears.

[crfriend]

I don't watch much TV, but my local PBS station was showing a Nova program on cosmology.

I want to see that, but unfortunately it's on way past my bedtime (I get up at 04:45). There's going to be a segment in it featuring Alan Guth and in the background are going to be a couple of period computing artifacts supplied by my computer history group in Providence and another by my ex-boss.

Obviously made in highdef, and the picture on my relatively new Sony LCD screen was outstanding. All this with the same set of rabbit ears.

Most new digital stations today in the US run in the UHF band (most of the VHF band having been effectively given to the telcos for 3G and whatnot) and UHF is still UHF -- and it's got some pretty nasty propagation characteristics to it, including the propensity to bounce off stuff which is what yields "ghosts" in conventional TV. The "ghosting" is still there, of course, but the newer receiver techniques and error-correction in the digital "content" get rid of most of it; if the multipathing was especially bad the image would start "blocking out" or disappear entirely.