11 Facts About PAL

PAL video is composite video because luminance and chrominance are transmitted together as one signal.

Almost all of the countries using PAL are currently in the process of conversion, or have already converted transmission standards to DVB, ISDB or DTMB.

PAL was adopted by most European countries, by all African countries that had never been a Belgian or French colony, by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and by most of Asia-Pacific.

Countries in those regions that did not adopt PAL were France, most ex-Soviet states, Japan, South Korea, Liberia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

In 1993, an evolution of PAL aimed to improve and enhance format by allowing 16:9 aspect ratio broadcasts, while remaining compatible with existing television receivers, was introduced.

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Early PAL receivers relied on the human eye to do that cancelling; however, this resulted in a comb-like effect known as Hanover bars on larger phase errors.

Some countries in Eastern Europe which formerly used SECAM with systems D and K have switched to PAL while leaving other aspects of their video system the same, resulting in the different sound carrier.

The majority of countries using or having used PAL have television standards with 625 lines and 50 fields per second.

NTSC is used with a frame rate of 60i or 30p whereas PAL generally uses 50i or 25p; both use a high enough frame rate to give the illusion of fluid motion.

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.

Games ported to PAL have historically been known for having game speed and frame rates inferior to their NTSC counterparts, being typically slowed by approximately 16.