Téléavia CA137P

My current desk tube, which is plugged into my computer and which I mostly use to play emulated games on, replacing the kv-1442FE. It's a Thomson rebrand, and I've also seen it sold as a Brandt.

It would be a somewhat unremarkable 14incher from the 80s if it didn't have the particularity of being able to sync to the old french 819 lines standard. In technical terms, this means it is capable of syncing to a 20.4kHz signal, which would officially mean a resolution of 737i@50hz (the leftover 72 lines being blanking). While this isn't rare on older french sets -most b&w Tvs from the 60s or 70s do it-, this is new enough to have SCART as its input, which means you can get some high resolution RGB goodness. You can also easily switch between the two : channel 4 is set up to be at 20.4 while the rest are at 15.7. Since I can do custom resolutions from the pc, I tend to prefer 600i@60hz to the old standard. This allows for an extremely clean image, without coil whine from 15khz or interlaced flicker (the TV is small enough that the lines overlap each other, hiding the flickering), as you can see with the deelit photo on the left.

SCART was invented in 1980 and 819 lines was abandonned in 1983, meaning this set was sold between those two dates. To add to its frenchness, it is a SECAM only set (when not using RGB). No PAL here !

Aside from that specificity, it's a rather common set, though I admit I'm quite fond of its coarse slot mask look. Lately it's been starting to have a few issues relating to horizontal deflection, so I'll need to find the time to try and work on it somewhat.

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