early color wanna be's

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by yagosaga

You should not forget that the stability of modern equipment does also reduce saturation errors of the PAL system. But the halved vertical color resolution is the disadvantage of PAL. Especially when you watch a video recording of a PAL broadcasting.

But on the other hand, the color subcarrier of PAL is 4.43 MHz, the color subcarrier of NTSC is only 3.58 MHz. PAL does provide a much larger video bandwidth, and together with 25 frames per second, while NTSC has nearly 30 frames per second, the horizontal resolution is much better than with NTSC.

If you watch the same video content with a PAL and with a NTSC receiver, you will find the PAL display much sharper and detailed than the NTSC display. On the other hand, with larger displays, you can notice more flicker with PAL.

The color reproduction of NTSC with a proper adjusted NTSC color tv set might be much better than with a PAL set due to the higher color resolution.

- Eckhard

I'd like to see the difference myself, although I do believe you are correct, but I just never saw a 625 line, 25 frames a second, PAL or SECAM color picture in my life so I would like to experience it. One of my buddies studied in France (of course they use SECAM) for a year at the University of Strasbourg and I asked him, "what the picture quality is like." He basically said the same as you, you do have a higher resolution with some flicker but he though colors were more or less the same. Then again, this is SECAM and he joked, "well, I didn't go to France to watch TV." I've heard stories where to synchronize films to European TV, sometimes they would run the films at 25 frames a second instead of 24 and to some ears, you can tell the difference with the slightly higher pitch in the soundtrack.