Why, after the introducing of the P.A.L. coulr televison system in Europe, the P.A.L. was not introduced in the U.S.A. In fact, P.A.L. is superior to N.T.S.C.
They could treyed to introduce the P.A.L. on the East-Coast states with big number of inhabitants, like New York and Pennsylvania, to see if the public like it (thay also could manufactured colour sets that could work bouth in P.A.L. and N.T.S.C).

PAL may be superior, but if my study of television and its history is correct, the NTSC system was invented first, back in around 1953. PAL didn't come around until the early 1960's, and by then, the U.S. system was already firmly in place.

Tom

Firstly the colour system NTSC was already well established in the US when the PAL system was introduced in the mid 60's,

Although the PAL system was based on the NTSC system, it was refined by 3 importent technoligies.

1. A swinging burst is used to change the phase of the R-Y signal phase plus & minus 45 degrees on every 2nd line (Alt Lines)

2. A chroma delay line is employed to avarage out any phase errors in the chroma signal.

3. A half line frequency or ident signal is used to switch the phase of the R-Y signal on every 2nd line.

To have introduce now would have made all existing colour TV's in the US obsolete.

(thay also could manufactured colour sets that could work bouth in P.A.L. and N.T.S.C).

That would probably be easy today with the whole TV system on a chip, but back in the tube days it would have cost quite a bit of $$$ to duplicate both systems in every set. Maybe PAL was better (I don't know the specifics) but I doubt it was THAT much better to justify screwing around with trying to convert from existing NTSC being adopted in the US to use PAL instead, duplicate the broadcasting equipment etc. Sounds like a potential nightmare to me.

From all I have read, PAL is/was indeed better than NTSC... they didn't jokingly call it Never Twice the Same Color for nothing.
Tom

Most of the Never The Same Color problems come from the production end not the set. The biggest difference with PAL vs NTSC is the frame rate. I can't stand the flicker myself. It may have a bit more stable color but there was no reason to change.
Just think what it would have been to move back east and your color tv won't work. We had millons of set by the time PAL came around.

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Remember Japan has 50HZ power and 60 field 30 frame NTSC just like the US does. Some poeple think PAL may look better because it has better vert resolution because of the 50 HZ frame rate.

Just as with HDTV, when the Japanese thought they were a shoe-in for the system they went with 15 years ago, the atsc went thru 9 propsed systems before settling on our current form of digital television. The ntsc system was already too far down the line with color already being demonstated in the forties using the ntsc system. If I were an engineer I would be biased against something that someone else thought up. Pal and Secam are better systems but so was the beta-max vs vhs. the rest is history.

The second N.T.S.C. (the one in the early 50's that set the U.S. color system) did experiment with phase alternation, but at field rate. They wanted to try this to allow both the I and Q signals to have asymmetrical sidebands, which would cause phase distortion at the edges of objects. There were no 1-line delay lines, let alone 1-field, so those sets had to rely on eyeball averaging of the phase. (The first practical consumer-priced 1-H delay lines were the galss ultrasonic lines developoed for PAL TVs in the 60's.) They concluded that there was noticeable flicker, and the phase distortion problem was eliminated by the use of extended lower I sideband only, with symmentrical Q sidebands. They did not directly contemplate using phase alternation as a means of reducing or eliminating hue adjustment errors.

By the way I disagree that SECAM is superior to any other color system - it requires all sorts of compromises in the system design to prevent objectionable cross-luma artifacts, and is impossible to use in even simple mixing systems due to the impossibility of linearly adding the FM subcarriers from two pictures. Production for SECAM countries is typically done in PAL, with a final conversion to SECAM for broadcast. If they had kept the concept of alternatng R-Y and B-Y lines, but used AM carriers instead of FM, it would have achieved the goal of hue stabililty without all the detriments that it has. Also, because of the frequency modulation, usign a comb filter to improve luma resolution is impossible in SECAM. (Color saturation is another matter - both NTSC and PAL can suffer color saturation errors if the color subcarrier is attenuated or amplified with respect to the luma, as in antennas or ghosted channels that do not have a flat frequency response, while SECAM will maintain correct saturation regardless.).

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I assume that you would not only obsolete all of the color NTSC sets by switching to PAL, but also the black and white sets in use too. NTSC came about partly because it was backwards compatable with B&W tv.

Ive owned several tv's(during the 80's and 90's )that were PAL and NTSC together.They came in handy when I was in the military(they sold them on military bases),moving so often all over the world.I even had a few dual system VCR's.God help you if you got back to the states,and sold your tv/vcr,and still had tons of PAL tapes :thumbsdn:
Jimmy

I assume that you would not only obsolete all of the color NTSC sets by switching to PAL, but also the black and white sets in use too. NTSC came about partly because it was backwards compatable with B&W tv.

Oh, they could have done a PAL system using 525i/60Hz scan rate. Think somewhere in South America has that. So B&W sets would still work. Existing color sets (NTSC) would get real confused on a PAL signal with a subcarrier at 3.579MHz, as the "V" or "Pb" chroma signal would be flipping polarity line to line. Reds would stay reasonably consistant, but blues would bounce between blue and yellow line to line, essebntially canceling out at distant viewing distances from the set.

The slight improvement PAL would then give wouldn't have been worth the penalty of obsoleting all teh existing color sets and studio equipment already in the field.

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I was always under the impression that PAL's 'superiority' was mostly on paper anyway, and that in the real world, <b>at the same line and frame rate</b> PAL and NTSC would look darn near identical.

PAL sets are considerably more complex than NTSC, too I think.

By the time color caught on in the US, broadcast equipment and sets were likely reasonably stable anyway. I sure don't spend tons of time (if any) tweaking the tint on my CTC-7, and we're not talking about a blue to green face shift anyway. On my 60's vintage Zenith portable, I seldom touch the tint control unless it got bumped out of adjustment.

Grasnted most TV sets you see in the US are setup like crap and show crap pictures as a result - this isn't a defect in NTSC though.

Actually, it's Brazil that has "PAL M" - same scanning standards as NTSC, but alternating phase by line. By the way, it's the R-Y that switches phase. The burst has a R-Y component in addition to the -(B-Y) component, causing it ot switch phase +/- 45 degrees. The alternating phase makes a comb filter for luma very difficult to accomplish, since the phase alternation makes the (R-Y) line up from line to line, just like luma. To get away from this, PAL also offsets the color subcarrier slightly so that the phase of both R-Y and B-Y cancels from frame to frame.

ATSC is a big step from NTSC. ATSC is better, but thats because it's digital. It will be years, and I mean years before you see an ATSC set in everyone's home. I still don't understand why you don't see smaller ATSC sets using svga CRTs with cheaper ATSC tuners, but I guess because NTSC is still around, you won't see ATSC sets very much.

<rant>But today, there are three options to get TV from, off the air, cable, and satellite. Cable providers (in the US anyway)that provide HDTV provide it through boxes which connects to an HDTV monitor. It's probably cheaper and better that way so they don't have to send full bandwidth ATSC signals down a coax cable verses using their QAM modulators and their own re-encoded HDTV signals. And the fact that you have to use their boxes with their service also is what bothers me. The ones that scientific atlanta make leave much to be desired. The firmware sucks. I personally hate cable tv with a passion, because cable companies today royally suck, but satellite providers are not far behind.

Satellite TV that most people have are the Ku band dishes of echostar and directv, but while you don't get the high prices of cable, you get the yearly commitments. I have a second receiver on my parent's account, and they had directv for over 5 years, so they won't get a termination fee, but if they sign up again and then choose to cancel, they will. I'm getting fed up with pay satellite too, they screw you just as bad as cable, but in a different way. HDTV on satellite is the same as on cable, same channels, same bitrates. Free to air satellite using your C band and Ku band dishes is the way to go if you can get the channels you want, but your backyard looks like you are part of NASA, but you can get NASA's channel though. :P

Over the Air signals are still there, but I hate broadcast network programming other than local news and PBS. The toilet-full of thrillers and reality shows is the reason I never watch them.

All in all, TV programming is slowly going down the drain, as well as providers trying to squeeze every lasy penny from you when all you watch is a few channels. But in the end, most of us will be watchinbg cable or satellite either on channel 3 or 4, or through AV inputs using the same NTSC standard that was always there. Lets face it, TV's are being used for nothing but monitors anymore, whether from videogames, dvd players, cable or satellite boxes, the drive for tv providers to get our money will always be there, and they'll think of any way they can deliver the content to us, either in DVDs, OTA, cable, or satellite. </rant>

Jonathan