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by cf100clunk
1393 days ago
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For technical reasons inherent in the chosen standard, NTSC TV sets required hue and color knobs, unlike PAL and SECAM. This effectively left it up to the consumer to adjust those values, with no accounting for variances in eyesight or taste. Unfortunately it meant that entire households had to endure the choices of whomever (Dad?) controlled the TV. On visits to others' homes it was painful to see how apallingly bad some peoples' preferences were. With PAL and SECAM the hue and colors were set to a standard, and that was that. Having said all that, the 29.97fps frame rate of NTSC was much easier on the eyes than the flickering 25fps of PAL and SECAM. |
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The US oft has this problem, we tend to be early adopters of technology on a wide scale, so by the time a thing comes along that solves most of the inherent problems in the v1, we already have a wide scale implementation of the thing. This happened with TV color, phones (24 Channel T1 vs 32 channel E1 and aLaw/uLaw), credit cards (mag stripes), and all sorts of other things.
SECAM had some real advantages, but made working with composite signals hard, because of their FM nature. PAL and NTSC are reasonably close conceptually, and frankly so is PAL, you can easily encode PAL into SECAM, because it's mostly the composite signals that are different.
NTSC was originally 525 lines/60 fields per second (odd/even lines) giving an effective refresh of 30 fps, the 525 lines itself was dictated by our 6MHz channel width, and the field refresh by our 60Hz power. When they added color, they dropped the field refresh down to 59.97 to deal with a beat frequency issue between the color subcarrier and the audio subcarrier.