"kilopascal" wrote on 2002-07-12 04:40 UTC:
> > - It can be expected that the analog broadcasting systems NTSC/PAL/SECAM
> > will be deactivated worldwide within the next two decades. The UK in
> > particular has already specific plans to shut down PAL broadcasting
> > by 2010.
>
> I don't think you really understand the american way of doing things. The
> NTSC will NEVER be deactivated. At least not officially. There never will
> be a cut-off day, at least not in the US. NTSC used in other countries
> might have cut-off days, but not here.
In Europe, governments have discovered that mobile communications
operators (cellular phone companies) are willing to spend ridiculous
amounts of money for licenses to use the UHF radio spectrum. Billions of
euros have been paid two years ago for the UMTS licences for instance.
The radio spectrum has become a cash cow for governments, and the analog
TV broadcasting systems consume around two orders of magnitude more
spectrum than the digitally compressed and modulated ones. The digital
transmitters also require significantly less power to achieve comparable
range and quality.
Governments will shut down PAL for the simple reason that the TV
broadcasters will soon not be able any more to make competitive bids on
spectrum auctions with such dinosaur standards.
I have no doubt that the same will happen with NTSC, because this is
about money and not ideology, and the US had in the past no problem
adopting new standards quickly that provide a clear advantage in terms
of money or power.
There is a different approach in the US and Europe though:
- The US have decided to double the image resolution with the move to
HDTV, which consumes some of the efficiency gain that digital
compression provides
- In Europe, early HTDV market studies have found that only a small
market segment of viewers (high-end geeks using video beamers or other
very large format screens) will benefit from the higher resolution.
The majority of the population is happy with the current CRT sizes and
resolution and not willing to pay more for HDTV.
Therefore, the current European digital TV broadcasts (DVB) are currently
in the same resolution as what PAL already offered (768 x 576 pixels at
50 Hz interlaced), and the only quality improvement is that PAL
artifacts are gone (cross-luminance/cross-color distortions), and
the horizontal resolution has improved somewhat (comparable again to
what 7 MHz black and white TV used to have). Also the sound quality
is better than with PAL thanks to MP2 compression. Both 3:4 and 9:16
image formats are supported. The DVB system has already provisions for
HDTV, should the market develop with cheaper LCD projectors.
> I don't know much about the standard the new system uses or at which
> frequency band they use.
Then read the specs of the US system on http://www.atsc.org/
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
