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Originally Posted by Jerrek
525... I don't actually know what you mean by the infamous muddy picture. You probably had old equipment. Today's equipment works just fine. Quite frankly, I prefer the 60 Hz over the 50, and less black space when viewing movies. *shrug*
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You wouldn't - you had nothing to compare it with. If you watch a programme originally recorded on videotape in 625-line PAL on a 625-line PAL TV in the UK, and then you watch an imported American programme recorded in 525-line NTSC videotape, there is a noticeable drop in picture quality. It's inevitable - an NTSC TV picture has 15-20% less information in it than a PAL picture does.
However, if you watched an imported UK TV show recorded in PAL but broadcast in NTSC, I don't believe you would be able to take advantage of the additional picture resolution, because your TV networks are only geared up to transmit 525 lines of picture information.
This is nothing to do with 'old equipment' - my 2-year-old Sony widescreen TV exposes the yawning quality gap between PAL and NTSC just as well today as my old Decca set did 20 years ago. Any imported US TV show made available to UK TV networks on videotape rather than on film shows this phenomenon off admirably.
EDIT: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications notes on its website that the PAL method results in 'more stable and consistent hue' in colour TV pictures. If PAL is noted for consistent colour, it follows that those who use it would berate NTSC for being 'Not The Same Colour' or 'Never Twice the Same Colour'.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCMS/tr...tails/pal.html
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCMS/tr...standards.html