[time-nuts] LightSquared gets at least some political attention

J. Forster jfor at quik.com
Sun Apr 17 10:44:17 UTC 2011


You always wind up with third best.

First best never comes,
Second best comes too late.

Almost nobody in 1960 had color TV. The first time I saw it was in the
summer of 1963, and the programs were in B&W, commercials in color, in the
biggest TV market in the USA.

-John

==============


> On 04/17/2011 12:45 AM, Charles P. Steinmetz wrote:
>> John wrote:
>>
>>> IMO, your crack about NTSC is unjustified.
>>>
>>> IMO, NTSC color was a very elegant engineering solution to backwards
>>> compatability. Without that, we could well be still watching B&W.
>>
>> The other contemporary backward-compatible solutions -- PAL and SECAM --
>> did not suffer from the color drift that plagued color NTSC. So, there
>> were superior methods of backward-compatible color insertion available
>> and the FCC still chose the NTSC method. Bad decision, which saddled the
>> US with inferior broadcast video for 60 years -- just as choosing 8VSB
>> has done for digital video in the US.
>
> This is why "Never Twice Same Colour" became an alternative expansion of
> NTSC. If you look at PAL you will see that it was made more resistive to
> multipath phase errors by alternating the polarity of one of the colour
> difference signals on every other field, which by interlacing will cause
> the opposite turn in the colour spectrum on the next line so on average
> they will cancel.
>
> As I recall it, the original choice of colours for the NTSC caused greif
> over time and was in practice changed later. A quick check on the NTSC
> wikipedia article verifies this.
>
> So NTSC didn't get it all quite right.
>
> Also, stepping from 60 fields per second to 60/1,001 fields per second
> still haunts us when PAL stayed at 50 fields per second. For SD-SDI they
> where able to match them up to a common 270 MBd, but for HD-SDI we have
> 1,485 MBd and 1,485/1,001 MBd. This had to be solved with dual
> oscillators in the first products, then with a re-synthesis chip and now
> there is oscillators with dual frequencies which is good enough. This
> 1,001 factor also comes into play with some audio production... so this
> factor remains with changed underlying TV system.
>
> So some of their particular technology choices isn't a good long term
> solution.
>
> NTSC did manage to get a colour solution out of the door, but it wasn't
> the best technological solution for its day.
>
> Cheers,
> Magnus
>
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