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Originally Posted by dr.ido
I don't know exactly what the story is behind Australia getting color, but considering we got B&W in 56, 75 for color doesn't seem that late. My guess without actually looking anything up is that we were following England, but then they got color in what? 67? I don't know if an NTSC system was ever tried here.
I know that some of the earliest color sets here were essentially English sets with VHF tuners. Those hybrid Decca sets are almost the only color sets I've seen here with tubes in them. They used tubes in the horizontal output and possibly in the vertical section (it's been a long long time since I've seen one). I say almost as I've seen at least one set brought over from England that had been fitted with a tube VHF tuner salvaged from a B&W set.
At any rate I'm glad we went with PAL. I've seen both and while NTSC can look good I prefer PAL. It just seems to do some things better. I haven't really looked into why, but while NTSC from Laserdisc or DVD can look very good (I've haven't seen over the air NTSC) NTSC from VHS or a game console looks noticably worse than PAL (though wherever possible I use RGB).
Maybe if things worked out differently we could have ended up with the worst of all worlds, 405 line, 50Hz, NTSC.
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I think I once read somewhere where there was an Austrailian commission set up for the uses of television. It was something along the lines of a big event would spur them on to do something with TV. For example I think the opening of the television service in the 50's was spurred on by the hosting of the Olympics. I'm not sure about color though.
PAL can give a wider gamut than NTSC (more colors) mostly because most European implimentations give a little more bandwidth to the signal, I'm not sure how wide the channels are in Austrailia, so that may or may not be the case.
NTSC generally looks better on an NTSC set though. I've seen NTSC on multi-standard and PAL sets that can playback the pseudo-NTSC pictures that are generated by some VCR's and it doesn't look like it should. The blacks are very crushed and the colors tend to be washed out. The reason is that the NTSC and PAL color gamuts don't line up perfectly. So what is reproduced as one color on NTSC would then be reproduced differently on PAL. Also American NTSC uses a 7.5 IRE level for its blacks. PAL uses 0 IRE. The end result is that your blacks (and whites) don't line up either. If its any consolation PAL pictures look rather overprocessed when you see them on an NTSC set.
The reasoning for PAL was to make terestrial broadcasting more reliable. In the end, most people in the States use cable which sort of moots the PAL advantage since the signal is closed sent via closed circuit RF.
All that being said I've seen bad and good pictures on both systems. As far as what you could get that would be worse, I'd say that would have been 405 line with SECAM color. SECAM (as the French use it) has half the color resolution of either NTSC or PAL and uses AM sound (because they use FM to transmit the color carriers). SECAM was also developed to solve the phase problems with terestrial broadcasting, but ended up introducing new ones of its own.
Oh well, we're all using the best television standards the 1930's could supply.
David