Robert Hampton

Another visitor! Stay a while… stay forever!

4th October 2008

Digital Penetration
Posted by at 4.08pm | Television | No responses

A contest has been launched to find the world’s oldest television. It’s the brainchild of Digital UK, who want to dispel the (fairly widespread) myth that a new TV set is required to receive digital TV.

Reading the BBC’s report brought back memories of a dull family holiday in North Wales in the mid-1990s, the only memorable moment for me being the ancient 1970s-vintage TV set in our room which took about thirty minutes to warm up and had just four channel buttons (BBC1, BBC2, IBA1 and IBA2, the latter two presumably for snooty people who didn’t want to have anything labelled “ITV” in their living room).

Anyway, John Logie Baird’s grandson has been roped in to help the campaign, and spake forth to BBC Radio Scotland yesterday:-

“It might be something from before WWII or the late 60s or 70s. We will see what kind of entries we get. Ideally it would be something as old as 1936 when the first electronic TVs came onto the market.”

I’d like to see them convert one of those to Digital — which set-top box on the market today can output a 405-line VHF signal?