On 7/04/2010 10:12 PM, William Sommerwerck wrote:
I'm left wondering what exactly was the *real* problem that PAL
was intended to fix. It appears that the NTSC tint control could
only address a fixed phase offset between the colour burst and
the subcarrier, with both transmitters and TV sets able to
maintain that offset sufficiently closely that the hue wouldn't
vary from left to right of the picture.

Correct.


Other issues, such as non-linear phase shift would have been
a problem for NTSC viewers, regardless of the tint control.

Also correct.


So were NTSC viewers tolerating colour pictures that couldn't
be set right even with the tint control? Or is there something
else that I've missed?

You /have/ missed something, which I explained "long ago and far away".
grin

OK, I vaguely remember your saying that now.

In the UK, colour was only transmitted on a new 625 line service
(newish, in the case of BBC2), in parallel for a long time with a
monochrome 405 line service (except BBC2), and I'd have thought the new
transmission infrastructure could have been built to obviate the
non-linear group-delay, given that it existed in the USA.

And, as I commented before, the Sony Trinitron sets, which didn't
implement PAL, performed acceptably according to my memory.

Sylvia.