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.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by andy

I was just playing with one of my CTC-53's with Accucolor. The name couldn't be more misleading. There was a golf game on, and with Accucolor turned on, the grass went from green to reddish brown. Intense blues became turquoise.

My best guess is the AccuColor system in your CTC53 must be badly misaligned, as the color distortions you mention with the AccuColor function on seem incredible. However, that's probably why most people didn't use the auto-color correction systems in TVs that had them; they probably figured (and rightly so) that they could get a much better picture, with accurate colors, by adjusting the color controls manually.

[t0nito]

Originally Posted by NowhereMan 1966

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.

I don't know about NTSC tvs out there but now nearly any modern tv here in Europe is multisync/multisystem, I think for you to experience the difference you should use a CRT. LCDs have digital processing and interpolation before getting to the display so I believe you will hardly notice any difference at all (Besides my opinion is that LCDs suck for analog standard definition anyway). Try getting a tv that supports multisync and try getting a PAL source like a dvd player with PAL output, if you can't get a PAL dvd look for a PAL interlaced video on the internet and recompress to MPEG-2 with high settings and burn it on a dvd.

I have both systems here, I was in canada so I have an NTSC VCR hooked up to my tv that supports both systems, in my opinion NTSC VHS videotapes look much better than PAL even when recorded with EP speed compared to PAL's SP, maybe because NTSC has less banwidth the recording is more accurate compared to the original signal. But based on digital satellite reception PAL's live broadcatings look better to me then NTSC, colours are more vivid and resolution is much more detailed, both signals coming from the same receiver and with the same TV.

(Sorry for the long post, and sorry for getting a bit off topic)