no of course in th UK i am watching PAL but if i watch the British open it's a very diffenent experiece to watching the garish greens when i watch the masters etc.... i am talking here of pal recordings on pal transmissions not pal on ntsc transmissions or vice-versa, 625 lines is 100 lines higher in def than ntsc so the quality is always going to be higher.....but when its being converted thats a different story i am sure, a pal recording probably wouldn't look much diff than an ntsc recording on an ntsc set, in fact i guess it might even look worse.....
My Grandfather hated color television. He said that it never looked right to him. He always bought B&W TVs until he couldn't anymore. When he had to buy a color TV, he turned the color down on it and watched everything in B&W. The last year of his life, my Father moved in with him to help take care of him. Dad would bump the color up a notch about once a month. Gramps finally noticed, and admitted that the new color TVs were much better than the old ones. Unfortunately, it was a bit late in the game for him. As to the OP's questions, I'm 42 years old, and I remember always having a color TV. Pictures, and home movies confirm that we had color TVs at least since the late 60s.
That has no bearing on what I'm talking about. I don't think you've ever in your life been able to sit down and look at the exact same material on a 525 monitor and a 625 monitor side-by-side. If you had, you would say, "yeah, there's not a lot of real difference except that the PAL has more flicker." And that's honestly the truth. Again, you're making an argument about stuff that mattered in the 1980s and 1990s. PAL and NTSC ceased to be a factor about 15 years ago. The world has moved on.
the world has moved on with high def etc but i thought we were mainly talking about old colour VT, mind you the masters and US open still looks bright green on every screen I've seen lol ( maybe its the bermuda grass ) ! however i would admit that watching modern USA colour VT the improvement from 20+ years ago is massive.....its still not quite the same as far as quality is concerned imho but the difference now is pretty minimal so I'm happy to cease posting on this issue if you are ;-)
And how were those sets calibrated? How do you know what you see is real? The problem is that you're trying to make judgements on how something looks, and you have no idea if the monitor is telling you the truth or not. All the PAL work I've done was on very heavy, very expensive, studio broadcast monitors that were adjusted on a daily basis by an engineer. And the PAL monitor was right next to the NTSC monitor. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. There's no inherent difference in NTSC and PAL color. There are differences in transmission standards, and PAL is more accurate... over the air. Hey, at least you didn't bring up SECAM: "System Essentially Contrary to the American Method." The best thing about that is that it's pretty much gone away.
lol yes, that was just the French being awkward...."There are differences in transmission standards, and PAL is more accurate... over the air. " I guess thats probably what i was trying to get at....
Since when weren't the French awkward? I think the French do certain things extremely well -- fine art, wine, beautiful women -- but technology is not high on that list.
My parents didn't get a color TV until 1986 so I didn't see TV shows like Get Smart in color until years later in reruns. I thought it was B&W being a rerun at the time! I didn't know what the kids at school were talking about when the subject turned to color. Cartoons were dreary. BTW my parents still don't have internet...or even a fax machine. Surprise, surprise.
Both PAL and SECAM were attempts to work around the issues that phasing problems caused to the NTSC colour burst component, which required the use of a tint control to work around. The colour bust signal is effectively the red and blue components send 90 degrees out of phase with each other, so phasing errors in this component would result in a tint skew. SECAM appeared first, and simplified things by alternating between red and blue components between scanlines, and used a delay line to interpolate the other. PAL flipped the phase of the colour burst signal on alternate lines, causing a skew to effectively cancel itself out. Unfortunately in the case of our first colour set, the PAL decoder would occasionally go one line out of step, inverting the wrong scan line. The resulting colours were interesting, to say the least. A channel change usually fixed it.
You could theoretically use any of these encoding systems with any number of lines and frame rates, you just need to adjust the various component frequencies accordingly. The BBC's initial colour tests in the mid 1950s used NTSC encoding on the 405 line system, and Brazil used PAL for their 525 line system. The switch to 625 lines across Europe with the introduction of colour was more a harmonisation project. Many countries used 625 lines already, the exceptions being the 405 line set-up in the UK, and France's 819 line system which also operated in Belgium and Luxembourg. One of the reasons why France adapted SECAM was that it worked the best over large transmission distances used by the French national TV networks.
yes I know the BBC experimented with 405 colour but it was pretty awful apparently but what i am trying to say is surely with more lines you must get a better picture regardless....
I know -- Phase Alternate by Line. They also shifted the color burst to 4.43 MHz instead of the 3.58 MHz used for NTSC, which gave them that extra luminance bandwidth. I still prefer "Pretty Awful Looking."
I've told Europeans before: the difference between me and you is that I actually mastered over a thousand PAL recordings in my life. PAL ain't that big a deal. And again, it's a dead format, all replaced by digital transmissions today. Back to the original subject. Here's the December, 1953 announcement by RCA and NBC on the adoption of "compatible color" as the official U.S. standard: The funny story on this clip is that I was working on mastering a lot of the old Sid Caeser Your Show of Shows kinescopes for Mr. Caeser, and while I was spinning through a reel, I came upon this announcement. I figured, what the hell, so I threw a cassette in (VHS!) and snagged a copy of it. 25 years later, I mentioned it to a friend of mine, who immediately borrowed the cassette and uploaded the picture to YouTube. I apologize for the bad picture quality, but it was a spur-of-the-moment thing done without any preparation or thought. It is an interesting historical curiosity.
Great story. I do love selling TV's. There are so many things that people buy today that are just consumerism, driven by the satisfaction that comes with buying something you've been interested in without considering how much use it would actually get, or whether it's an improvement on what you already have. Although its sad how much time we devote to it, there is no doubt that money spent on a television is money spent on something that will pay for itself in terms of enjoyment hours you get out of it. I know when I am sending people home with a TV that they really liked, I am sending them home with something that is going to make them happy for a long time, even if that happiness isn't genuine fulfillment. I'm also the type of salesman that pushes customers towards quality, not highest sales price, and to something they will like once they adjust to the look and start to perceive flaws.
You need to move to California! I've never encountered a TV display sales person that does this out here.
yes indeed, well done for copying it...I've seen the " first colour VT recording " from 1958 with Eisenhower ( spell check pls am British sorry ) which is another one....in the UK we just wiped almost everything grrrrrr......
ps, one of the earliest surviving substantial Colour VT from the UK is the complete serial Vanity Fair from late 1967 , I think it only survived because it was shown in the States as part of Masterpiece Theatre in the early 70's. The only full surviving colour episode for the third 1969 season of Out of the Unknown is the last Lonely Man but was I believe recorded as far back as May 68, a fairly poor example is on You tube at the mo, better examples have been on there in the past....there is also another complete surviving BBC2 costume drama from 1968 with Richard Chamberlain during his post Kildare european arthouse period, Portrait of a Lady ( aka show without a proper ending lol ).....
This colour TV installation film was prepared by BREMA (British Radio Electronic Manufacturers Association) and was show daily on BBC2 as part of their trade test transmissions between 1967 and 1971. It may have also appeared on BBC1 and ITV. Apologies for the poor quality, I presume it was taken from an early colour video tape system.
Being animation ( from memory ) I guess it would have originally been film, thats probably why it survives....its the VT stuff that was decimated due to the cost of the tape and the need to re-use....A bit like home videotape, when i first got a VHS machine in 1978 tapes were 15 pounds for a three hour tape...within a few short years you could get them for a quid !!
