NTSC (National
Television System Committee) is the colour encoding
conversion standard that is used in most of the North
and South Americas and Japan (click
here for a list of countries that use NTSC) for television, video
and DVD playback. It was created as a standard in
the United States in 1941 for black and white television
broadcasting.
NTSC uses a screen resolution of
720 x 480 pixels and has a refresh rate of 30 frames
per second. In comparison, the rival PAL
standard (used in much of Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia
and the Middle East) uses a higher resolution of
720 x 576 pixels, but a lower refresh rate of 25
frames per second. In essence then, NTSC has smoother
pictures, particularly when using high speed footage,
but PAL has a better picture quality than NTSC.
There is unfortunately an inherent
colour problem in the NTSC system for television
where the same colours can change hue from one side
of the screen to the other due to multi-path distortions
(reflection of the signals off objects before they
reach the antennae) of the broadcast signals and
because the frequency is only recalibrated at the
start of each line on the screen.
Many modern DVD players
will play and convert both NTSC and PAL DVDs and
will also play DVDs that may have specific regional
encoding, helping to avoid the regional problems
created by the different formats and specifications.
Find out more about the PAL
standards.
View other CD
and DVD production FAQs.
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