21–30 of 47 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember going to the US in 1998 and being shocked at how bad NTSC TV looked compared to PAL, the colours just looked wrong.
Back when I used to moonlight in video production, the quip was that NTSC was an acronym for 'Never Twice the Same Colour'. The French SECAM system? 'Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method' I'll lead myself out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more obvious in US NTSC that the PAL being discussed here .... essentially the colour subcarrier was put way out in the high freq part of the luma signal - display - anything with too high a bandwidth and it stomps on the colour - you've all seen this happen on analog TV ... and it has had profound effects on fashion .... let me explain ... So what does "high frequency luma" mean? it means that the brightness of…
I remember going to the US in 1998 and being shocked at how bad NTSC TV looked compared to PAL, the colours just looked wrong.
Black&White-tv was almost HD, 625x625. Then they added 3Mhz color-carrier in 1966 and it was 300x300 with this color-furze on top. This sucked so much. There was nothing I wanted see in living color. Especially winter-sports were mostly BW. I remember that color movies sucked also in 1950s. Technicolor has annoying fuzziness around objects. See Wizard of Oz.
> Black&White-tv was almost HD, 625x625. Then they added 3Mhz color-carrier in 1966 and it was 300x300 Maybe adding color did decrease the luma bandwidth and hence the horizontal resolution. I'm not sure about that. I think bw signals just used less bandwidth overall. But in no way did color decrease the number of lines in the image. Those are defined by the scanning raster and remained the same in color and bw telev…
But it did. If you did not want to see the annoying 3Mhz color-carrier on your BW-TV, you had adjust the focus to 300 horizontal lines, which affected the vertical focus too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more obvious in US NTSC that the PAL being discussed here .... essentially the colour subcarrier was put way out in the high freq part of the luma signal - display - anything with too high a bandwidth and it stomps on the colour - you've all seen this happen on analog TV ... and it has had profound effects on fashion .... let me explain ... So what does "high frequency luma" mean? it means that the brightness of…
None of this supports the parent's claim that TV went "from black&white 625x625 to color 300x300", which is just wrong on several levels.
Obviously no one here has experienced pure crystal-clear BW-tv and what happened when they turned the color-carrier on. You had to adjust the focus so that horizontal resolution was below 320. And of course the vertical focus was similarly affected, as there was no separate screws for that.
Black&White-tv was almost HD, 625x625. Then they added 3Mhz color-carrier in 1966 and it was 300x300 with this color-furze on top. This sucked so much. There was nothing I wanted see in living color. Especially winter-sports were mostly BW. I remember that color movies sucked also in 1950s. Technicolor has annoying fuzziness around objects. See Wizard of Oz.
Super-good BW-TV was 625 x 625 x 25 = 10 Mhz. The color-carrier was 4.3 Mhz. So if you did not want to see the color-shit on your BW-TV, you had adjust the focus so that less than 625 x (4.3e6/(625 x 625 x 25)) == 275 horizontal lines were visible. TVs did not had separate adjustement for vertical focus. So all you really had was 270x270 TV.
Except of course there never was 10Mhz TV-channels. It was below 8 Mhz, which was needed for full color. So there was moment of time, when we could enjoy 8Mhz black and white for a year. Almost 600 horizontal lines. And then they turned the color on and party was over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't speak for Australia, but Israel in 1970's considered colour television as "a luxury that would increase social gaps"[0], and a similar colour burst erasing happened. This has lead to a rise of anti-erasing devices that reconstructed the colour burst, returning the colours. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_killer
Wow, caring about social gaps. Unthinkable today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more obvious in US NTSC that the PAL being discussed here .... essentially the colour subcarrier was put way out in the high freq part of the luma signal - display - anything with too high a bandwidth and it stomps on the colour - you've all seen this happen on analog TV ... and it has had profound effects on fashion .... let me explain ... So what does "high frequency luma" mean? it means that the brightness of…
I remember going to the US in 1998 and being shocked at how bad NTSC TV looked compared to PAL, the colours just looked wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember going to the US in 1998 and being shocked at how bad NTSC TV looked compared to PAL, the colours just looked wrong.
For technical reasons inherent in the chosen standard, NTSC TV sets required hue and color knobs, unlike PAL and SECAM. This effectively left it up to the consumer to adjust those values, with no accounting for variances in eyesight or taste. Unfortunately it meant that entire households had to endure the choices of whomever (Dad?) controlled the TV. On visits to others' homes it was painful to see how apallingly bad…
The US oft has this problem, we tend to be early adopters of technology on a wide scale, so by the time a thing comes along that solves most of the inherent problems in the v1, we already have a wide scale implementation of the thing. This happened with TV color, phones (24 Channel T1 vs 32 channel E1 and aLaw/uLaw), credit cards (mag stripes), and all sorts of other things.
SECAM had some real advantages, but made working with composite signals hard, because of their FM nature. PAL and NTSC are reasonably close conceptually, and frankly so is PAL, you can easily encode PAL into SECAM, because it's mostly the composite signals that are different.
NTSC was originally 525 lines/60 fields per second (odd/even lines) giving an effective refresh of 30 fps, the 525 lines itself was dictated by our 6MHz channel width, and the field refresh by our 60Hz power. When they added color, they dropped the field refresh down to 59.97 to deal with a beat frequency issue between the color subcarrier and the audio subcarrier.
This is from 2008 - what are the newer developments in this space?
Black&White-tv was almost HD, 625x625. Then they added 3Mhz color-carrier in 1966 and it was 300x300 with this color-furze on top. This sucked so much. There was nothing I wanted see in living color. Especially winter-sports were mostly BW. I remember that color movies sucked also in 1950s. Technicolor has annoying fuzziness around objects. See Wizard of Oz.
Had to correct numbers: Super-good BW-TV was 625 x 625 x 25 = 10 Mhz. The color-carrier was 4.3 Mhz. So if you did not want to see the color-shit on your BW-TV, you had adjust the focus so that less than 625 x (4.3e6/(625 x 625 x 25)) == 275 horizontal lines were visible. TVs did not had separate adjustement for vertical focus. So all you really had was 270x270 TV. Except of course there never was 10Mhz TV-channels.…
The other lines are for the vertical retrace, when the video signal is blanked.
With square pixels, the B&W image would have been 576 x 768, which requires a 7.5 MHz analog video bandwidth (@ 50 Hz vertical & 15625 Hz horizontal frequencies).
Most 625-line B&W TV sets could display 576 x 768 images very well and some of the early personal computers with video outputs for TV used this format.
Nevertheless the broadcast TV signal was limited by a low-pass filter to lower horizontal resolutions, corresponding to 5 MHz analog video bandwidth in Western Europe and to 6 MHz analog video bandwidth in Eastern Europe. The reason was to provide space in the TV frequency channel for the audio signal, which used a carrier offset from the video carrier by 5.5 MHz in Western Europe and by 6.5 MHz in Eastern Europe.
So the broadcast B&W signal was worse than what the B&W TV sets could display, corresponding to 576 vertical pixels by about 510 to 620 horizontal pixels (depending on the country).