Doc,
I fully agree with you, we have only scratched the top of the technical iceberg and up to now we did not even talk about human perception and interpretation of what the eye "sees".
As for my remark concerning the quality of PAL versus NTSC, it is kind of a joke because of the above. Moreover, when I travel to America, I almost always watch TV in a hotel room, where the signal is distributed amongst so many sets and through so badly laid cables that I am sure I should not compare it to what I get home with a decent cable provider. Anyway, we should define "quality" first.
I am astonished when you say that you see the flicker more at the theater, because there is a huge difference in how the picture is presented. As you know, on TV, the picture is made by phosphors emitting light following excitation by a rapidly scanning electron beam. If you look at the on/off ratio at anyone pixel, you conclude that a TV screen is in fact totally black most of the time and if you see a picture, it is only because of the retinal decay time following a photoexcitation. At the theater, on the contrary, the picture is presented on screen most of the time, the screen going black only for a very short time while the film advances by one frame. Your visual recovery must be pretty fast indeed.
Joachim,
I wonder if the difference you mention in the colour looking natural or artificial might come from the fact that the colours used as the two reference axes of the graph representing all colours are different: NTSC uses Cb and Cr, whereas PAL uses U and V. Don't ask me to what exact colours these correspond. What I also found out (but this is once again from my hotel TV viewing experience) is that americans seem to like more saturated colours than we europeans do.
Oh, and once again, flickering has no meaning with LCD or plasma screens.
Michka
I fully agree with you, we have only scratched the top of the technical iceberg and up to now we did not even talk about human perception and interpretation of what the eye "sees".
As for my remark concerning the quality of PAL versus NTSC, it is kind of a joke because of the above. Moreover, when I travel to America, I almost always watch TV in a hotel room, where the signal is distributed amongst so many sets and through so badly laid cables that I am sure I should not compare it to what I get home with a decent cable provider. Anyway, we should define "quality" first.
I am astonished when you say that you see the flicker more at the theater, because there is a huge difference in how the picture is presented. As you know, on TV, the picture is made by phosphors emitting light following excitation by a rapidly scanning electron beam. If you look at the on/off ratio at anyone pixel, you conclude that a TV screen is in fact totally black most of the time and if you see a picture, it is only because of the retinal decay time following a photoexcitation. At the theater, on the contrary, the picture is presented on screen most of the time, the screen going black only for a very short time while the film advances by one frame. Your visual recovery must be pretty fast indeed.
Joachim,
I wonder if the difference you mention in the colour looking natural or artificial might come from the fact that the colours used as the two reference axes of the graph representing all colours are different: NTSC uses Cb and Cr, whereas PAL uses U and V. Don't ask me to what exact colours these correspond. What I also found out (but this is once again from my hotel TV viewing experience) is that americans seem to like more saturated colours than we europeans do.
Oh, and once again, flickering has no meaning with LCD or plasma screens.
Michka
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