jpa144@cit-vax (06/21/85)
From: jpa144@cit-vax (Jens Peter Alfke) From Gaylene Callaghan: > ... BTW, I was under the impression that the UK videos cannot be > played on US machines. That means you would need to buy a UK machine > to copy the UK video to US tape. It's worse than that. You would need a UK machine to play the tape, a UK television to watch the video signal (it's PAL format, not NTSC), and even a 50hz (maybe 220V) power supply to power the VCR and TV. Then someone with a good color camera and VCR (American) would have to record the TV picture. Needless to say, this will not give you good results. There are some (rather expensive) machines which convert from one format to another. The main problem is that PAL has 625 scan-lines in a picture, while NTSC (American) has 525. The scan-lines have to be averaged together. (For graphics buffs, this is just like anti-aliasing.) Annoying, isn't it? There are several British videotapes that I would buy if it weren't for the difference in formats. (We got stuck with NTSC, sometimes known as "Never Twice the Same Color", the earliest and worst. Most of the world uses PAL ("Perfect At Last"). Now high-resolution TV will appear and make yet another standard or two ... ) --Peter Alfke jpa144@cit-vax alfke.pasa@xerox after 6/30