This is a very peculiar problem- I'd be extremely grateful if any of you could help!

Samsung DVD/freeview box plays back/displays programmes in black and white on my Panasonic TV. It was working fine until last week.

It's not a scart problem, as a second DVD player plays back in colour on the same TV. And weirdly, the Samsung box plays in colour on another TV.

Any ideas?

You have simply selected "S video" on the TV .

Change it back to standard on the TV ( remote ) and all will be OK again .

Thank you soooo much- sorted

Ideally for best picture quality you should be using RGB video mode on the Freeview/DVD. That is if both it and the TV support that mode on the SCART connections you are using. Not unknown for a telly to have RGB on only one SCART however so check the specs of the TV to find out which SCART does RGB.

The Freeview/DVD machine should do RGB on the main TV SCART (or it may call it AV1).

Thank you...just checked and there's only one scart socket on the TV, and it's RGB

If you were getting no 'colour' then it wasn't working in RGB - you can't get a 'no colour' fault on RGB, as there's no colour signal - just three separate video signals (Red, Blue and Green).

Is there something I need to select on the remote (either TV/DVD) to get an RGB signal then?

Generally it would be a setting on the DVD player, although a few very old CRT sets did have RGB buttons on the remote to manually select it. Not much use though, as without RGB selected on the DVD player it might not output RGB anyway (although some certainly do).

Thanks...will have a look

In this context, doesn't the "RGB" label simply mean that particular SCART connection *can* accept RGB (i.e. you could still feed it a composite signal via that socket and *that* would be displayed if that was what it was given)?

An RGB SCART socket on a TV will display RGB if the required switching signal is present on pin 16 (fast RGB blanking), otherwise it will display composite instead (automatically selected by the voltage on pin 8).

Basically pin 8 selects SCART, and pin 16 further selects RGB - the RGB menu option on the DVD player commonly does nothing else than switch pin 19 ON or OFF, with RGB being send out regardless of the setting.