Could NTSC VIR = PAL

[NewVista]

Mr WB, given the alleged advantages of PAL, (as well as its technical drawbacks)(and inconvenience of broadcast & consumer media playback incompatibility), do you think it was wise for those few South American countries to adopt (525/60) PAL-M & PAL-N?

[ppppenguin]

Brazil certainly decided to play "odd man out" with PAL M. I can't see any real reason why they shouldn't have used NTSC. They were the only 525/60 country that didn't use NTSC.

PAL N is another matter. Argentina had the unfortunate combination of 625/50 monochrome TV with US channel spacing. So they couldn't use standard NTSC or standard PAL. Something had to give and the result was that ugly kludge of PAL N.

The arguments for PAL vs NTSC have been gone over many times. When Europe was looking at colour systems they could have adopted NTSC, suitably adapted to 625/50. The BBC and others experimented with 625 line NTSC (and 405 line NTSC) in the 1950s. Rightly or wrongly, at the time, the colour phase accuracy problems in NTSC were seen as severe. Hence both PAL and SECAM. In the later days of NTSC improved technology meant that NTSC could overcome the phase and differential phase problems.

Later still it was found that PAL was harder than NTSC to accurately convert to colour components for the digital world. Again advances in technology have made this unimportant.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by NewVista

Mr WB, given the alleged advantages of PAL, (as well as its technical drawbacks)(and inconvenience of broadcast & consumer media playback incompatibility), do you think it was wise for those few South American countries to adopt (525/60) PAL-M & PAL-N?

I think the main disadvantages of adopting PAL in South America were economical, that it made it less likely that a color TV manufacturing plant could be established there without government support either directly to the manufacturer or by high tariffs on imports. Plus, the production and stocking of special models for those countries may have raised retail prices.

Technically, once equipment became transistorized and stable, the only advantage of PAL transmission I can think of was the reduction of wrong hues in ghost images.

There may have been an improvement in color accuracy (as there was in Europe) if the cameras were matrixed to the EBU phosphor standards and receivers used unmodified R-Y and B-Y axes. In the US, color matrixing was a sort of wild west situation in which CRTs did not use NTSC phosphors, but cameras (at least the early ones) were designed for them, while different TV makers did various non-ideal modifications to the chroma decoders to compensate approximately.