The reality is much more mundane. NTSC was perfectly fine.
It gained a bad reputation becuase of problems in distribution,
which were managment issues, not technical ones.

Given receivers were fitted with a front panel hue control, it must
have been a known issue. PAL sets have no such device.

They don't? I've never understood how an automatic Hue control would work on
a PAL set.

NOTE: I just started browsing the Wikipedia article, which is loaded with
errors. For example, it says:

"PAL was developed by Walter Bruch at Telefunken in Germany."

Note "developed" (not "invented"). Herr Bruch might have added useful
features, but PAL is basically the original NTSC proposal.

"NTSC receivers have a tint [sic] control to perform colour correction
manually. If this is not adjusted correctly, the colours may be faulty. The
PAL standard automatically cancels hue errors by phase reversal, so a tint
control is unnecessary. Chrominance phase errors in the PAL system are
cancelled out using a 1H delay line resulting in lower saturation, which is
much less noticeable to the eye than NTSC hue errors."

Just about everything there is wrong. I think.


I wonder just how available were the delay lines needed when NTSC
was introduced? They were quite an expensive component years later.

The anticipate cost of the additional circuitry was one of the reasons NTSC
dropped phase alternation. The Wikipedia article states that a PAL receiver
"needs" a 1H delay line, but I don't see why that is an absolute
requirement.


For what may have been a good technical reason when the 405
line system was developed in the 1930's, by the time the new
system was designed around 1960, there was absolutely no
technical reason that the US system, as implemented, would
not work in the UK. (50 fields/25 frames versus 60 and 30).

Well, film uses 24 fps. Probably for a good reason. Which makes
25 somewhat closer. But not going for NTSC allowed the use of
625 lines. And therefore better resolution.

NTSC gets around the frame-rate difference with 3:2 pull-down. European TV
simply runs the film 4% faster, at 25fps. Neither system is ideal. At least
Blu-ray displays motion pictures at their correct frame rate.


SECAM on the other hand really was designed to make TV Sets incompatible
with NTSC/PAL and more expensive.

It was actually designed to get around the problems of recording video
images on tape.

By the way... PAL has no more /horizontal/ resolution than NTSC. (The
bandwidth/line is about the same.) The extra hundred scanning lines is nice,
but the eye judges resolution more by horizontal resolution.