As a general point, please distinguish between studio and transmission standards. The same 625 PAL studio kit is used in all 625 line countries. Including most of the SECAM ones because a SECAM vision mixer is an evil piece of kit. I know, I've been on the fringes of designing one. The SECAM countries, notably France, were enthusiastic early adopters of component signals in the studio
. All studio stuff is now component, usually digital.
Transmission standards are another matter. There's a whole alphabet soup of them with many minor differences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Synchrodyne
Finally - for now, anyway - when was 625-line System N introduced? I would guess that Argentina was the first country to use this system, which “squeezed” a 625 line signal into a 6 MHz NTSC channel, I would imagine to ensure that the whole of South America (or nearly so, anyway) adhered to a standard channeling system. But the 6 MHz channel was perhaps a little ironic considering that in 1950, Channel E1, 41 to 47 MHz, was deemed unsuitable for 625-line television.
|
System N was a bodge. Argentina has 50Hz mains and so naturally used basic 625/50 TV. The channels planning however was American giving narrow channels. This didn't matter too much for monochrome, you just lived with a bit less resolution, but colour was a nuisance. Ended up with a roughly 3.5MHz subcarrier (as used for NTSC) but using PAL. Totally non-standard. Studio systems used ordinary PAL-B 4.43MHz subcarrier and transcoding to PAL-N was done at the inputs to transmitters.
South America is the home of oddball standards. Brazil uses PAL-M which is a properly engineered PAL 525/60 system. Not surprsingly the studios use NTSC and transcode at the tranmitters.