English NTSC TV's.
 

When Sony imported colour TV's into England in the early 70's they didn't have a PAL licence, to get round this they converted the PAL signal to NTSC. They did this by dropping the alternate phase line of PAL, stored the previous line with a delay line, repeated it & used an NTSC decoder, & it worked. My Mother had an 18 inches version of this set & it had an outstanding picture. The only difference between it & a standard PAL set was it had a hue control on the front, a standard PAL set didn't need a hue control as the hue never changed as the PAL system canceled out any hue errors. It was still working perfect when my Mother passed away in 1994, my sister had it after & I don't know what happened to it..

I've seen this on a CVM-1310E set here in Australia. I'm not sure where it was originally imported from. I don't think Sony were the only ones to use this approach - though I don't remember who else did it. I don't consider these sets to be NTSC, they're still PAL - just using a different (simpler/cheaper?) approach.

The "real" UK NTSC TVs would be the experimental 405 line NTSC sets that were tested before they decided to go with a 625 line PAL system.

The KV-1800AS was the first Sony to be officially sold here and has a proper PAL decoder. When we got a eventually got an official KV-13??AS model it also had a proper PAL decoder.

It's really amazing that they can build Multi-standard color sets.
They seem to have been out for several years now. I have a few that can operate on NTSC-M&C, Secam and PAL.
I refer to my Samsung 15", as my Osama Ben-Laden set, as it looks just like his.
I bought on E-BAY and it was originally sold in Saudi-Arabia. :D

I think Sony were among the first with multi-standard with their KX-20PS1, KX-27PS1 and their various cube monitors. They all (at least in the versions sold/found here in Australia) supports PAL, NTSC and even SECAM. Of course these were high end models - multistandard didn't become a standard feature in lower end sets until much later. Even then Sony lead the way. I've got a basic low end Sony 14" set from around 1990 that does PAL/NTSC (probably not SECAM) when most similar sets from other manufacturers were still PAL only.

When PlayStation and DVD became a thing everyone here needed a multistandard TV. They may not know or care what PAL/NTSC are, but they noticed when their imported games/DVD movies didn't play in color. Official local releases are all PAL, but US imports are obviously NTSC as are almost all bootlegs and pirate copies (despite usually coming from parts of Asia that use PAL).

Hehehehe.. I remember reading about how PAL & SECAM were developed-Ostensibly, to be "Superior" to the crude & "Inferior" NTSC, but REALLY were developed as a "Thumb in the Nose" of the Americans, & ultimately RCA, whose heavy-handed sales tactics infuriated the Europeans.... But the Japanese were able to negate PAL & SECAM by "Back Engineering" them w/decoders. And, as we all know, even the mighty American home electronics industry couldn't stand up to the onslaught of Japan, Inc. Mene mene Tekel...

Well I learned something new about foreign TVs today...

I've heard SECAM described as System Essentially Contrary to American Method and NTSC described as Never Twice the Same Color. I assume there is one for PAL as well.

I'd also heard that many countries that chose SECAM over PAL did so in an effort to prevent their citizens viewing broadcasts from neighboring PAL countries.

PAL was sometimes called "Peace At Last" in the UK.

NTSC is good system but with 1960s technology, let alone 1950s, it was very hard to maintain good colour accuracy through the broadcast chain. Ideas of using phase alternation were first tried at Hazeltine Labs in the late 1940s (I think I've got that right). Henri de France's SECAM and Bruch's PAL were both solutions to the colour accuracy problem.

SECAM is utterly different to NTSC except for the use of colour difference signals. It's also a horror story for anything byond simple cuts in the studio. Even a fade requires horrible processes that degrade the picture.

PAL used the idea of phase alternation to stop phase errors giving wrong colours. Line by line alternation depended on having a low cost 1 line delay line in the receiver. PAL receivers without one "Simple PAL" didn't give very good results and were never marketed. AFAIK.

There was no need for Sony to reverse engineer PAL. The PAL system was described in the Bruch/Telefunken patents. What Sony did was treat PAL as a sort of NTSC to navigate round the patents. Hence these Sony sets needed a hue control which true PAL sets did not. Commercially these sets were a great success and paved the way for Japanes dominance of the UK TV market. The likes of Sony and Toshiba made good reliable sets which the UK industry couldn't match until a few years later.

I started a thread on 'UK Vintage Radio Repair & Restoration' site last year about this subject, it's called 'Sony PAL to NTSC converter'. It explains how Sony did it. It's burst back into life in the last couple of days..

Some American manufacturers made a few "Simple PAL" receivers for the South American market, I believe.

It could've been Motorola. They built a Quasar set that was PAL compatible.
They discontinued it, when Matsushita bought their TV business.

I posted this elsewhere but here is a interesting set on the oldtechnology site

http://www.oldtechnology.net/images/ekcoct100m.jpg

the details are found on this page http://www.oldtechnology.net/colour4.html

When Australia introduced colour in the 1970s (very late to the party).. we adopted PAL... with Telefunken owning the patents only Oz and European manufacturers were licenced to sell sets here...well that was the plan until GE announced they were happy to licence the Japanese companies.... thru their cross patents with Telefunken. The result that Sony etc were able to sell full PAL-D sets.

A number of other sets were directly imported by retailers. Hence the Sony 13" mentioned above... the only Sony set officially released here was the KV1800AS ... a full PAL-D set but multistandard sets were available as well with European PAL G tuners (which did not receive our odd channel 5A)

So the sneaky Sony TV would store the 'NTSC' lines and repeat them in place if the sequential 'PAL' lines :thmbsp:

A standard PAL-D TV would store the 'NTSC' line and process it with subsequent 'PAL' line. This would halve the chroma vertical resolution.

But it gets worse because of interlaced scanning: now sampled detail from two lines above is added to 'PAL' line
creating more degradation than unprocessed pure 'PAL' & 'NTSC' lines (as in a PAL-S receiver)?
And if there is picture motion even more blur.

First PAL sets used visual averaging of complementary hue errors (if any) over odd & even line pairs with different line in between:saywhat: creating annoying "venetian blind" artifact. Disastrous idea given interlaced scanning.

Because of the location where PAL was invented, this got the nickname "Hannover bars."

AFAIK all UK colour TVs used delays lines and so didn't show Hanover blinds (or bars) unless the decoder was misaligned. The early Sony sets effectively converted PAL to NTSC and so didn't show them either.

The Telefunken PAL patents were administered by EMI in the UK. All the receiver manufacturers paid but EMI didn't both to chase the broadcast equipment manufacturers who made PAL encoders. I think this was a sort of de minimis thing as the numbers of encoders was tiny compared to decoders. Until some time in the early 1980s when EMI were going through one of their many financial panics. I was working at Michael Cox Electronics at the time and EMI threatened the company with royalty payments for all the 1000+ coders that MCE had manufactured since the late 1960s. I don't know how that was resolved.

If PAL-Delay were working with progressive scan then V chroma res would be halved, but with interlace it becomes way more disastrous: The summed interlace pairs have double the separation. This, and its diminished "Kell factor" would take V chroma res down to <80 'lines'. Same for H chroma res with motion - maybe down to ~50 lines.

NTSC-M could achieve ~ 100 x 350 'lines' chroma

Since chroma bandwidth is much lower than luma the reduction in vertical resolution doesn't matter. PAL decoding just about equalises the H and V chroma resolutions.

PAL decoding also moves the chroma down by half a line wrt luma. Again this doesn't matter unless you cascade codecs. More modern comb filter decoders can keep the Y and C in vertical alignment.

"..moves the chroma down by half a line wrt luma."

The way I see it, it would be two lines displacement (line 1 to 3, line 2 to 4...)?
This would be another PAL-D chroma artifact - creating headaches for designers of decoders for standards converters..
The H res one being worse than progressive scan conversion sans motion compensation which blurs so badly
designers would rather just double fields (in early days) kind of like THAT notorious Sony "PAL" TV did).

Only the Germans could come up with such a Heath Robinson solution to Hanover Bars.

PAL and SECAM were variations on a theme developed by NTSC. The acronyms I have heard for each are interesting and define well the politics between the variations:

NTSC - Never Twice the Same Colour (as explained earlier in this threa)

PAL - Problems Are Lurking - This name probably arose from the editing of PAL. It was painful because of the 8 field colour sequence rather than the four NTSC offered.

SECAM - System Essentially Contrary to the American Method - With France and it possessions and the Soviet Bloc adoption, the name says it all.

Canada could have easily fallen prey to the German propagandists and ended up paying license fees for PAL-M like those suckers in Brazil.
Fortunately Canadian bureaucrats were on the ball.

Not something that can normally be said abut them.

Our flag for example: Yuck! Before that was brought in, the country's "de jure" flag was the Royal Union flag.

Enough about that I guess.

Wise government in Ottawa seeks compatibility with US standards.
I always thought Ottawa was in French Quebec! Till I looked it up! This morning!
If it was, Canada would have been SECAM ( Séquentiel couleur à mémoire )!

& probably 819 lines then convert to 625 lines, both with positive modulation & AM sound.. :)

Back in 1996 I worked for Samsung developing a multistandard decoder chip. KS0127 datasheet. If the burst changed frequency line to line, it was SECAM. If the burst frequency was steady, and line to line phase was 180 degrees flip. it had to be NTSC, if it was (something like +45 and -45 IIRC), it was PAL. And we'd switch in the appropriate processing. Our chip could handle a variant of NTSC running at 4.43MHz subcarrier, or PAL with a subcarrier at 3.58, though few if any countries broadcast those. We PLLed on the horizontal line frequency and used counters to identify the burst subcarrier frequencies.

I looked the data sheet and it's really impressive!
It took a group of highly-gifted engineers to come up with that scheme. :thmbsp:

KS0127 datasheet.

Says it comb filtered PAL with two lines storage, didn't know that could be done, wonder if later PAL TVs that promised Comb filtering really did it?

Large analog+digital jungle-chip:

Done in Silicon Valley? Even with workstation circuit development > simulation > photo layout systems, what if fabricated batch had bugs!?

After all that development, many chips soon obsolete, before R&D costs can be recovered?

in the real world...
 

Having seen PAL and NTSC in their real world forms OTA and on analogue cable...let's not over state the problems of either.

Far greater difference in quality with the two systems lies in the 525/60 625/50 standards.

From a viewer perspective .. 625 line (ie 576i) makes for a noticeably sharper image.

But I have to say my experience is that the colour via PAL is better (somehow red never looked right in NTSC) .... but the much feared phase error never occurred when viewing late NTSC OTA (80s+).. not sure if it was an issue in 50s and 60s.

Feeding my late model Sony Trinitron NTSC from tape or DVD vs same program from PAL sources subtle differences in colour and black level are noticeable... along with 24 to 30 frame motion issues on the NTSC versions.

I am not talking technically here but purely subjectively.. how it looks to me...clearly different TV sets and broadcasting quality would play a big part.

PAL sets do not have a phase control - Hue/Tint for a reason ... you simply do not see phase error even when present.

BUT none of this is fair.. what would 625 line NTSC look like or 525 line PAL? (Or for that matter SECAM)

What does 405 line NTSC /PAL look like? Anyone ever seen that? The BBC seems to have not wanted to migrate to 405 line colour using NTSC because it was too good and might have reduced the demand for the 625 line service.

Did you guys in the NTSC world with tube sets suffer phase errors when you still had analog broadcasts? Real world test ... not lab stuff.

NTSC has wider red depth, so incompatible with PAL TVs

I'd forgotten that one - another reason PAL sucks.

The main difference I saw in NTSC/PAL (50HZ) in old sets
(pre LCD or plasma non-sweep, light always on) was the horrendous
flicker at 50Hz, making it virtually unwatchable at respectable brightness.

I never noticed color problems with NTSC on live material. I saw
it only on material from very cheapie film chains. This dates
all the way back to 1954. I got my own set (actually a college
TV room set, but I ran it) in 1962. It never suffered color
problems after I put a locking pot on the hue control.

I have an RCA CT-100 from 1954, restored this summer. I have it actually
"calibrated" to match my modern calibrated flat screen. Colors
are not absolutely identical on all material, but are on most.
The difference could be corrected by adding two more color
adjustment pots, as it depends on 10% resistors in the color matrix,
and its so close I have not bothered. 10% error is easily visible,
my errors are in the 5-10% range
This, of course, is with modern source material. Looking at
very old prerecorded VHS tapes it looks ... excellent,
without adjustment. Just not absolutely perfect. I looked
at two 40 minute long slide shows I made of two recent vacations
I took on the CT-100 and they had perfect color.

PAL was a solution to a non-problem. The solution to the REAL
problem (50 Hz flicker) was the light-always-on LCD or plasma set.
Incidentally, phase alternation was not invented by the Germans,
but was developed in about 1951 by RCA and Hazeltine. I have
seen the "CPA" (color phase alternation) prototype (which is
PAF, phase alternating field, though RCA also tried PAL) working and
it does work OK. Nobody noticed interfield flicker.

Fascinating you find the 50hz flicker an issue.... I never notice it.

I do notice the problem of 100 less lines though with 480i.

Have you watched 625/50 in a 50hz environment? I am wondering if your problem is the mix of 50hz flicker and 60hz lighting?

The CT100 of course had true phosphors.

The 50Hz I have seen has all been in 50Hz South American countries, Malaysia,
and England.

I was in Malaysia at the height of the CRT to flat screen "always on"
transition and the flicker difference between
CRT and LCD was amazing. In the US one could see flicker (at 60 HZ)
on CRTs only on the brightest computer monitors with a full-white
screen. It seemed to go away about 72 or 75 Hz

Of course, given the terrible 50HZ flicker problem, perhaps
European producers avoided white screens even more
than ours did (because of blooming in tube sets
on white screens).

I never noticed a resolution difference between 525 and 625 lines,
vertical resolution. But I never compared side to side.

People from 60hz countries often see flicker in 50hz countries for first day, then it goes away for rest of vacation!

By 1980s Tint control hidden in menu and best not messed with as solid state TVs had very accurate burst-Φ lock. To assess ⌂Φ over cable or network one would need a reference signal, chroma stairstep or color bars, on a vertical interval (VI) line and a vectorscope at receiving end. A cheap way would be to have a signal at burst phase in VI at 50% picture level & micro trim Φ with this?

The original NTSC red phosphor was indeed more red than current red phosphors. The problem was that it was also dim, something that was answered by rare earth phosphors, at the expense of colour gamut. All CRTs used since rare earth phosphors were invented (early 1960s?) don't go so far into the red.

There are no practical differences between the colour gamuts in PAL and NTSC. The colour gamut and rendering are largely down to how the cameras are set up and to a lesser extent the CRT. I've seen some really horrible CRTs but that's not a fault of the colour coding system.

As for colour gamut on LCD etc displays, this varies a lot. Sometimes good, sometimes horrible.

I agree about the difference in flicker between 50Hz and 60Hz. This is exacerbated by larger screens. Peripheral vision is much more sensitive to flicker than central vision. Overall, PAL has slightly better resolution than NTSC but in practice this is usually compromised by receiver design and CRT dot pitch. Comb filter decoders came much earlier to NTSC than PAL. A good PAL comb is more difficult. They certainly improve resolution and reduce artefacts.

Many years ago I spent a fair bit of time staring at the input and output monitors connected to a BBC "ACE" standards converter. High quality monitors, everything properly set up. It was hard to distinguish which was PAL and which was NTSC. Unless you caught the monitors out of the corner of your eye in which case the flicker gave it away.

405/525 line systems benefit from improved vert sync design for interlace, reduction of overscan to <1%, progressive scan with upscaling interpolation to 1080 & vertical aperture correction. For horizontal, analog or digital comb filtering, picture peaking and deactivation of scan-velocity-modulation. Results can look like good 35mm film.

My Wife has got epilepsy & was always affected (she'd get a headache & had to limit her viewing) by the 50hz flicker on CRT TV's in England, France, Spain & Malta. When we went to America (60hz flicker) she was hardly affected at all, she could watch a TV film all the way through with no ill effects. So what did she watch the most ? Eastenders that she'd already seen on WPBT (PBS) channel 2 Miami. Girls. (sigh) :)

We've now got an LCD TV that doesn't flicker at all, had it 6 years. Went to a friends house the other day & they'd got an old CRT TV connected to a digital converter box & boy did it flicker, I found it really annoying, but years ago it never bothered me at all, I think my brains flicker filter has stopped working through non use..

Back in the 80's there was talk of using frame stores to store the image and play it twice, to get the refresh rate to 100Hz. This was when CRTs were the only game in town.

I first saw this in a lab in the mid 1980s, before commercially available 100Hz sets. At first I could hardly see flicker even at 50Hz but after a while I became attuned to it. Watching 100Hz pictures felt very relaxed compared to 50Hz.

LCD sets inherently don't flicker, regardless of frame rate. The LCD cells have a zero order hold function by their nature. Motion portrayal is a different problem. LCDs have a laggy response, almost inevitably worse than CRTs, despite the whole arsenal of tricks employed by panel and set makers.