"We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. Do not try to adjust your set."
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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Outer Limits. Always wondered how many people heard that intro and really believed they had lost control of their TV
This photo was taken after Line 21 subtitles were available (1990s or later). And the TV needs more service than that: vertical linearity and convergence, at least. I can't judge color decoding in this scene, maybe the tint is just wrong or the red cathode is weak.
Or the tracking on a VCR.
I'm not that old... My parents had a TV remote when I was a kid back in the '70s.
It was me...
TV remotes back then were a big deal. I think lots of people would keep it on the same channel even if they didn't really care for the program because they were too lazy to get up and change the channel
especially when you can almost see titties on an hbo channel.
We had a descrambler filter for Cinemax back in the day. Good times. Skinimax
Who remembers beating the shit out their TV to get red to work again? Different times
Ah, scrambled porn stations…
…I mean, no.
I remember... The before times.
In this thread: young whipper-snappers who can't realize how nice they had it with new fangled set color television set boxes, and flat screen EL-CEE-DEEs and what-not!
Edit: When I was a young'n, we only had...oh, I guess I put it in my username there. Haha.
I remember having the controls but never actually needing to use them. I just would make the screen go wonky on purpose sometimes.
Had to adjust the tracking on VHS more than messing with V-hold or adjusting an antenna.
Yep. I’m 55 and totally remember doing this. I also remember when channels would play the national anthem before they stopped broadcasting and it went to snow.
55 here next week. That was time to go to bed. Much like it is for me right now.
My grandparents' beautiful wood console TV also had the more rare horizontal hold. I have many fond memories of watching Gunsmoke, Star Search, and Wheel of Fortune on the thing with my grandad.
Most do but as a higher-frequency (15kHz) oscillator, it has smaller components that don't drift as much and so the control is a trimmer inside only calibrated as often as a tube needs swapping. On transistor sets, that's like, never, so they glue the trimmer to avoid misadjustment during transport.
This is before even my time, what does this do?
It controls the beam that forms the image. Basically when it’s set wrong it looks like the image is scrolling past the screen.
Ah, some kind of frequency timing modulation fiddler thingy I guess? I don't know if you can tell I'm not in the field of electronics... 😎
Look up how a CRT works. As the beam draws picture fields, it moves downwards across the screen driven by a 59.94Hz sawtooth wave. The generator of this sawtooth wave needs to be synced to the vertical blanking interval between fields. "Vertical hold" refers to how long the oscillator waits before the window in which it can accept the sync pulse. Too soon and the picture scrolls down, too late and the picture scrolls up (however, slightly too late, as long as 1/59.94 seconds is still within the window, is fine and the picture can stabilize after one slow scroll up).
Seeing almost two copies of the picture means V-Hold is very late and the vertical oscillator is running way too slow. About 30-40 Hz, very flickery to the person taking the picture!
Ah, thanks for the rundown!