OT Ping Dave Plowman

[Doctor Evil]

It doesn't. It stands for: National Television System Committee

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Heh heh. But the NTSC we see *should* be ok, since it's the transmission system where it falls over, not closed circuit.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Clever boy. You've found out how to Google. Now Google for sense of humour.

[Jim Michaels]

Dr. Evil was referring to the very old and often true alternate version of the meaning of NTSC.

With modern digital equipment this is much less true. Remove SPAMX from email address

[Dave Plowman (News)]

DVD etc fed RGB or components into a TV doesn't involve NTSC or PAL etc coding. All such coding systems were necessary to allow compatibility between B&W and colour TV receivers, and throughout the transmission chain.

[Doctor Evil]

I did and it said "Dave Plowman: this is referred to as a big laugh."

[Jim Michaels]

Not exactly,

The difference between NTSC and PAL color systems is that PAL reverses chroma phase on each line thereby essentially canceling chroma phase misadjustment in the decoder (such as TV sets), NTSC on the other hand has a MANUAL chroma phase control which has to be set to match the incoming chroma phase to allow correct color decoding.

The Manual chroma phase adjustment that few consumers get even close is the problem with NTSC. Most consumers have all the other user adjustments on their TV set very wrong also, but this I am sure applies everywhere.

If you are watching a converted NTSC show, then it is an engineer at the point of conversion who is adjusting the NTSC chroma phase.

PAL's weakness is that vertical line pairs are averaged thereby reducing vertical chroma resolution.

Note: Either color system could be used at 625/50 or 525/60 line rates. Referring to 625/50 as PAL and 525/60 as NTSC is a great example of stereotyping.

Remove SPAMX from email address

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You're talking about composite analogue tape recordings. These were phased out in the early '80s for mainstream TV production. And component recordings aren't NTSC or PAL encoded. And before the '80s, most quality US TV shows were made on 35mm film.

[Jim Michaels]

Actually, I was thinking about the satellite link which often has composite video in to and out of the transmission path even if it is a digital path.

I believe that if people could get uncompressed 270mbit SMPTE 601 component digital video in their living rooms, most people would believe that what they were getting was equal to HD and even when shown HD side by side would not be willing to pay any substantial amount for the small difference.

Remove SPAMX from email address

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Ah - right. But live from the US usually consists of news stuff where technical standards are often poor.

Yup. But then very few TVs are capable of making a really decent fist of PAL 625 let alone anything better.