Quote:
Originally Posted by Penthode
It is also more amazing that the British chose an 8MHz channel for 625 broadcasting in the early sixties to accommodate full double sideband R-Y and B-Y quadrature demodulation NTSC in 1966 before making only the last moment move to PAL to fall in line with most of Europe.
|
Was a bit more complicated than that in the UK. The BBC generally supported a 625 version of NTSC. There was also a fair bit of support for SECAM amongst the ITV companies. Michael Cox (of CoxBox fame) and his colleagues at ABC TV (later Thames TV) did a lot of work on SECAM.
With our 8MHz channel we had enough space for wideband U and V. Hence no need for the phase shifted I and Q axes. That's true for both PAL and NTSC.
There was some unease about the differential phase and gain problems of NTSC. Also the need for a hue control and potentially very innacurate colours as a result of user adjustment.
I think we rightly ruled out SECAM as it was a nightmare in the studio. You can't fade or mix a SECAM signal without a lot of hassle an quality loss.
Good quality low cost 64us quartz delays came at just the right moment (from Philips) to make PAL a very strong contender. NTSC would have made the UK the odd one out among all the PAL and SECAM countries, though transcoding PAL<>NTSC on the same line standard isn't too hard. Just as NTSC<>PAL-M is also fairly easy.
Was PAL the right decision? Probably at the time. In retrospect it was much harder to get clean decoding of PAL than NTSC but this has now been largely overcome.