Slashdot Mirror
Fifty Years of Color Television
peter303 writes "The Houston Chronicle notes that color TVs were first manufactured on March 25, 1954 at a price of $1000 (about $4000 in today's dollars). Some of the older folk here remember the excitement of your first neighbors acquiring one of these in the 1960s and as the TV series one-by-one switched to color. Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV."
and it has nothing to do with the rising obesity ratio in the US of A of course. ;-) ...I'm starting to think its the United States of Ass
Its funny too because all the stuff you see on TV is fitness/beauty related.
Get paid to code OSS
I still say color TV is a fad!!!
SECAM (the french standard) is even better because it uses FM modulation for colour, so it eliminates both these problems, though it has its issues (you can't "mix" two SECAM signals together, which makes it a pain for some professionals).
SECAM, for all important purposes sucks ass and was just a case of the stupid arrogant French needing to be different. The entire history of SECAM was politically motivated, not technically. That FM advantage that you pulled out of your ass (are you some scum arrogant Frenchman or are you just stupid?) causes more harmful pattern effects than either NTSC or PAL. Furthermore, the FM subcarrier means that weak signal performance of FMSECAM is worse. With NTSC or PAL I can see a decent enough picture with an extremely weak signal. FM is not so forgiving in this regard. Furthermore, the kicker is that FM is not truly part of the SECAM "standard" which is another reason why SECAM sucks. When you refer to "SECAM" it is possibly an AM or FM subcarrier system.
The only real clever improvement (and "only" here is not imply that it is trivial) of PAL over NTSC is the better chroma encoding. The horizontal resolution is higher because the signal uses more bandwidth. This does make PAL better, but the latter improvement can be attributed only to better decision making, not any kind of engineering cleverness.