William Sommerwerck wrote:

It has been accepted by many, that NTSC has given *better* color
than PAL ever since solid state electronics have made phase
response stable in the early 1970's.

This is wrong for several reasons.

First, NTSC originally incorporated phase alternation, but it was dropped
because (in the early '50s) there was no easy way to take advantage of its
advantages. (I have the issue of Electronics magazine to prove this. The
earliest NTSC proposals also used equal-bandwidth R & B primaries. In short,
NTSC was basically PAL.)

Phase alternation was also dropped because the US microwave transmission had
excellent group-delay characteristics, which European transmission did not.
So phase-alternation's ability to automatically compensate for hue errors
(caused by non-linear group delay) -- at the cost of desaturation -- was not
much of an advantage.

Strictly speaking, NTSC is "better" than PAL because it provides wider color
bandwidth. The systems are pretty "Tweedle-Dum" and "Tweedle-Dee". They are
slightly different ways of doing exactly the same thing.

The reason NTSC too-often didn't look very good was simply lack of concern.

I thought the audio carrier frequency was lower with NTSC than PAL, giving PAL a
larger video bandwidth.

Yup NTSC's audio carrier is 1.5MHz lower acc to Wikipedia. Plus PAL had 100 more
lines. That's probably where the bandwidth went.

Then wasn't there a 'PAL + ' that recovered video above the audio signal. Never
knew how far that got.
Not sure what to make of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pal%2B

Graham