SECAM = System Essentially Contrary to the American Method
PAL = Perfection At Last
I want a time machine to go back and prevent the US decision makers to not fret about keeping a color system backwards compatible with B&W. I don't care to use the time machine to prevent war, making stock picks or sports bets. I just want to make my future career a little less insane by stopping this idiotic (in hindsight) decision. If there's enough time, I'd try to convince them to keep working on progressive scan and avoid more complications to my future career by not needing to deal with interlacing issues.
Weren't NTSC somewhat also grainier with more pronounced horizontal gaps between each scanline? Certainly seemed so.
Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency.
It doesn't have to be. Japan has a split power grid with 50Hz in the east and 60Hz in the west, but television frequency is 60Hz on both sides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/m...
The AC power line frequency was used for the vertical refresh rate for two reasons. The first reason was that the television's vacuum tube was susceptible to interference from the unit's power supply, including residual ripple. This could cause drifting horizontal bars (hum bars). Using the same frequency reduced this, and made interference static on the screen and therefore less obtrusive. The second reason was that television studios would use AC lamps, filming at a different frequency would cause strobing.
It is similar to the effect that could be seen when using native lighting in a 50Hz mains country while recording video in NTSC. Not everyone would notice, but when you sit in an edit bay working with that footage all day, you notice everything.
Then again, some people don't notice the stuttering that is the result from 24->29.97 either. The modern 4th frame repeat drives me up the wall. </rant>
I've personally never seen the ability to switch from mains frequency. That's a switch on the back of the PSU that typical goes from 240v or 120v.
The turbo button and mains frequency are 2 totally different things.
Though UK developers new what they were doing an optimised properly for pal. Goldeneye looks better on pal for example.
Australia is PAL too. I remembered waiting for this game and being so disappointed. It was $135 also which was a lot. Modern games are like $70.
This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color.
The last thing you wanted to see in NTSC was bright red because you'd continue to see it smear for at least 1/4 of the screen to the right. NTSC "Safe" red wasn't really red. Run a broadcast safe filter on 255,0,0 and see how far off it goes. Should be somewhere around 180,0,0 IIRC. The days of looking at vectorscope to see the red point shoot off while everything else was much closer. When it became easier to get digital images to tape, we'd have to adjust the chroma down on the TBC to bring it back into legal limits which would mean the rest of the other colors would get squashed when the client didn't work in NTSC safe color palletes.