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Michael Black[_2_]

On Mon, 30 May 2016, wrote:

Interesting, in fact everybody, interesting.

Next we need a thread on what all they crammed into the NTSC TV signal.
Like PRO audio which was another SAP essentially, the VITS or VIR,
closed captioning, ghost cancelling reference and who knows what else.

Man's innate lust to cram as much as possible into any given bandwidth.

No. They had a system first in use in the late 1930s, and times changed.
but they didn't want to start again, so they added that stuff, don't
forget color came in the fifties, tacked onto the existing B&W standard,
but it never improved the picture quality (though no more fussing with the
vertical or horizontal hold controls, actually the tv set I got in 1982
didn't even have them (or at least not on the outside).

With TV, they wasted it. They went digital because NTSC takes too much
bandwidth and has limited resolution. The problem is they cannot come up
with any decent programming anymore.

I actually got my first tv set since 1982 because of the changeover. I
thought about just getting a converter, but decided spending a bit more
meant I got closed captioning, stereo sound, much better image quality,
and of course I got rid of the CRT and went to LCD.

In other words, the resolution doesn't matter if there's nothing to
watch. I don't need 2,000 line resolution to watch Gunsmoke. Just like I
don't need 24 bit/96 KHz sampling to listen to music from the 1960s.

I notice a difference. After 70 or so years, it made sense to actually
scrap the old and move into the future. One might hope that this
"standard" can be extended if needed, so there won't be a need to start
from scratch again in the future.

Michael