TVs compatible, from one continent to the next??

Okay... Right...

Now you've lost me. I didn't know that DVDs were -- or could be -- made from composite sources. MPEG encoding wasn't intended to work with composite signals -- was it?

Modern sets can't be adjusted. The last TV I owned with a vertical hold control was the Sony KV-1920. The hold had sufficient range to lock to 50Hz sources. Every set since then has had scan sync locked to the color burst.

I thought we were talking about /color/ encoding and display. But since you brought up resolution... NTSC has better color resolution.

#1 is meaningless, because "in the studio", you can display RGB directly, without encoding.

I remember an article about 15 years ago in one of the pro publications arguing over color TV standards. The author -- who was someone famous (it might have been Henry Kloss, but don't hold me to that) -- said that the best color TV images he'd ever seen were NTSC. He was talking in terms of optimum reception and display.

They d "PAL was developed by Walter Bruch at Telefunken in Germany."

Note "developed" (not "invented"). Herr Bruch might have added useful features, but PAL is basically the original NTSC proposal.

"NTSC receivers have a tint [sic] control to perform colour correction manually. If this is not adjusted correctly, the colours may be faulty. The PAL standard automatically cancels hue errors by phase reversal, so a tint control is unnecessary. Chrominance phase errors in the PAL system are cancelled out using a 1H delay line resulting in lower saturation, which is much less noticeable to the eye than NTSC hue errors."

Just about everything there is wrong. I think.

The anticipate cost of the additional circuitry was one of the reasons NTSC dropped phase alternation. The Wikipedia article states that a PAL receiver "needs" a 1H delay line, but I don't see why that is an absolute requirement.

NTSC gets around the frame-rate difference with 3:2 pull-down. European TV simply runs the film 4% faster, at 25fps. Neither system is ideal. At least Blu-ray displays motion pictures at their correct frame rate.

It was actually designed to get around the problems of recording video images on tape.

By the way... PAL has no more /horizontal/ resolution than NTSC. (The bandwidth/line is about the same.) The extra hundred scanning lines is nice, but the eye judges resolution more by horizontal resolution.

50Hz

Correction. My NAD MR-20 also had a vertical hold control.

Perhaps the most-brilliant reverse acronym was for PCMCIA (personal computer memory-card international association):

"People can't memorize computer-industry acronyms"

William Sommerwerck wrote:

It depends upon what you mean by SECAM. SECAM as a color and video encoding method was designed as you say, to improve video recordings. SECAM as an over the air transmission system used by France was designed to produce a signal that could not be received by an NTSC or PAL TV set, would not display any color nor have any audio. Or vice versa.

This meant that you could only receive French SECAM TV signals on French TV sets, and French viewers could not receive foreign signals.

Many countries did use SECAM over the air signals that were compatible with PAL, and except for the color could be received on PAL TVs and vice versa. (look up PAL B/G versus SECAM D/K).

Two system (PAL/(me)SECAM) TV sets and VCRs were common, and if I remember correctly unmodifed PAL VCRs could play (me)SECAM tapes to a two system TV set.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.

That isn't the definition of resolution.

If 30 fps is needed for 'less blurring in live action' how come Hollywood managed at 24 fps for the large screen?

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*Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

It would be a very stupid studio that did so if it were intended for analogue transmission.

--
*Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

The vertical/horizontal resolution relationship is correct with PAL 625 lines. Unless US eyes differ from the rest of the world.

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*Be more or less specific *

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Viewing distance. Large screens are watched much farther away than TVs.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.

When colour started in the UK, it was only on one UHF channel out of 3. The other two were still 405 line VHF. So the first colour sets were dual standard.

Given the US never attempted to make sets to the UK mono standard of 405 lines - which pre-dated any US one - just why do you think they'd have been interested in any other UK market? A few years later, UK colour sets were UHF only when the other channels went colour.

I also doubt any US manufactured set would have been cheaper in the UK after transport and setting up a service/dealer network, etc. US cars, for example, have never been competitive here, price wise.

Your idea that the whole world should adopt US standards regardless of local conditions was just to protect their home industries says much. It's the reason why the far east has taken over the manufacture of such things. They tend to make what people want, rather than what the manufacturers think they should have. And the UK is equally as guilty.

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*When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty*

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

I take it light blurs with distance, then?

Does that make large screen TVs ok at 25 fps?

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*Income tax service - We?ve got what it takes to take what you've got.

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

How about "under ideal conditions"?

Have you ever worked in TV production? There are very good reasons why you wouldn't watch RGB in the studio if it is to be encoded later.

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*A boiled egg is hard to beat*

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Where they? I have never seen a dual standard (405/625) line TV set on a website, listed on various collectors pages, nor do any of the people who have video tours of their 405 line TV collections on youtube have any.

I'm not saying they did not exist, but if they did, people are going to a lot of trouble to omit them. You'd figure the guy who has one of the last 405 line TV sets (the model, not the actual set) and proudly shows it, would have one of the first 405/625 sets too.

Well, they would not. But in 1956 back when the UK was still stuck in the

1930's, you could buy a US color TV off the salesroom floor. If the BBC wanted to go to color, they could of just adopted the US system, and let people import US sets with transformers until one with 240 volt power supplies became available.

BTW, what you said about 405/625 line sets in general was not true, BBC one was a dual service, the second BBC channel was never 405. It started in

1963, two years before there were color broadcasts.

As for tuners, ALL US sets had UHF tuners by the summer of 1964.

Bad example. UK cars are mirror images of US ones, the only difference between an NTSC set receiveing NTSC signals in the UK versus the US was the power line voltage. An external transformer would have been around $25, which on a $1,000 item was trivial.

We've long since established that by 1956 the power line frequency did not matter.

WTF? Now you are projecting. Since PAL is the original NTSC standard as proposed, the UK had no TV network to speak of (just left overs from the

1930's), why not adpot an off the shelf technology that's already in use.

People wanted color TVs in 1956, they did not want a british system with little or no benefit except that it would take nine years before the first broadcast.

In the 1950's the concept of COTS (commerical off the shelf technology) did not exist and I'm not sure it has ever existed at the BBC. To be blunt, if the BBC had adopted the RCA system 100%, there would have been color TV in the UK in 1957.

So what real benefit did PAL provide?

Actually they did not. They started making what they wanted you to buy, but at a price so low you could afford to buy it and live with the missing features.

Look at VHS. VHS forced out all the other systems because the EU was going to impose VCR quotas. To prevent it, the Japanese manufacturers, except for Sony stopped making PAL and SECAM VCRs in favor of NTSC ones. They literally sold the NTSC ones BELLOW COST just to keep the factories running. (look up "dumping" and VCR).

People did not want VHS VCRs, they wanted BETAMAX VCRs. But when the equivalent VHS VCR was on sale for half of a Sony, they bought them anyway.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.

It would be very stupid to make a statement like that when you know nothing of how the video was processed. Some video processing systems could use either composite or RGB+Sync, but decoding the video first added more timing errors that had to be corrected elsewhere in the system.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Really. Name ONE that you didn't pull out of your ass.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.