television help

[mc]

we have had a proprty in france for about 3 years now. we only use it for a holiday home and now most of the repairs and decs have been finished i was wondering about bringing a television from the uk when we pop over to france in the winter.

[PeterG]

Beware, British TV's work on a different system to those in France. If it is an older type TV it probabley won't work.

[Jc]

And always has been! PAL v. SECAM.

[Ron Avery]

If you bring an old Sky box you can use an old PAL UK TV to receive UK TV via a satellite dish set up.  You will not get French TV by an aerial unless you have a SECAM option.  French TV's are not that dear, have a look in the supermarkets, if you get a new one you can watch French TV and UK satellite TV ( via a dish and box of course) on the AV or RGF channels on the one TV, but not at the same time of course.

[Dick Smith]

It doesn't have to be a UK TV. We connect our Sky box to a French-bought Sony - about a year old - and it works fine.

[P]

Picking up on PeterGs comment:

The norm in the UK with new decent sets is that they are multi-standard and will therefore receive PAL and SECAM - one of our sets is a Philips bought about 3 years ago and this is along with a Philips LC TV bought 2 years ago[:D] whilst a 14" Philips pertable with Video recorder bought 3.5 years ago isn't[:'(]

So if you are buying a new set in the UK and thinking of taking it to France at some time make sure it is multi-standard.

Paul

[Martin963]

Multistandard as far as colour system is concerned, yes. 

But as I have said many times on the forum,  colour is the least of your problems with a UK originated set trying to tune in to French analogue terrestrial.

You must make sure - if you want to watch the analogue channels with an aerial directly connected to the set -  that your TV is capable of tuning system L for France,  and an awful lot of so-called multistandard sets only do B/D/G/I/K but not L.

At least if you have a SECAM capable set which doesn't do L you could use a French VCR (with L) to do the tuning and then feed the o/p to the TV via SCART.

Alternatively,  certain DVD recorders not only tune L but also convert back to PAL.  Such as the Philips 3305 if you buy it in France.

But if all you want is to watch satellite from the UK and old tapes from a UK VCR  then a UKset of any sort is fine

[Quillan]

I must be lucky because I bought a philips TV about 4 years ago in the UK from a high street shop and it works fine here in France. Asked it to autotune and it did the rest. Perhaps it's just a philips thing.

[Martin963]

Philips do seem to be good on this matter.   It can work the other way,  we have a Toshiba set in France which does B/G/D/K and L,  but annoyingly won't do I,  so would be no good in the UK (at least not for the sound anyway!).

[Val_2]

Up until this afternoon we have been using a 30-year old english thorn TV that we had left over when we moved here as our french set went kaput a few weeks ago and its been fine connected to the Sky etc, but obviously no french and the colour is pretty awful so they do work. See my recommendation in the following thread for a cheap french set which is very good.