[MacDV] Re: PAL or NTSC better?

[Ron Woodland]

That was one of the original goals behind the development of the HDTV 
standard -- a common world-wide standard.  Unfortunately, that hasn't 
happened.  Similar to the complaint I have with the MPEG-4 vs. DivX 
codecs, too many special interest and political forces have hijacked 
the HDTV standard.  The choice to use NTSC, PAL, or SECAM in various 
countries is really more a political issue than whether one standard 
was better than another.  Having said that, I agree that NTSC is the 
worst of the three in use today, probably because it is the first, 
oldest, and the original standard.  When color television became 
technically possible, a new standard was proposed in the U.S. that 
would have delivered superior television quality but was rejected 
because of backward compatibility issues with B&W televisions already 
on the market.  I wonder what Philo T. Farnsworth (the acknowledged 
inventor of television) would think if he were alive today?

Ron Woodland


On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 11:46  AM, Jan E. Schotsman wrote:

>
>
> -------------------- Begin Original Message --------------------
>
> Message text written by Derek Roff
>
> "I wish the whole world would use PAL, or some common new
> standard, but the politics and economics have prevented that.  So I,
> and most of us, will continue to use NTSC, as long as we live in an
> NTSC country."
>
> -------------------- End Original Message --------------------
>
>
> Your wish might come true as Europe seems in no hurry to adopt its own 
> HDTV
> standard.
>
> Jan.