Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!onfcanim!dave
From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: A golden opportunity
Message-ID: <16099@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: 8 Sep 88 20:58:27 GMT
References: <1411@maccs.McMaster.CA> <20776@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Distribution: can
Organization: National Film Board / Office national du film, Montreal
Lines: 33

In article <20776@watmath.waterloo.edu> rbutterworth@watmath.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth) writes:
>
>30 or 40 years ago, Canada had the same golden opportunity
>to choose between the higher resolution PAL and the inferior
>NTSC.  PAL would have forced us to produce Canadian programs
>and would have discouraged people from watching the US stations.

Radio spectrum is a scarce resource.  If we had adopted a standard
different from the U.S., we would not have been able to watch their
transmitters, but we wouldn't be able to re-use those frequencies
for Canadian transmitters either.

We wouldn't even be able to agree "you take channel 12 in this are and
we won't use it for anything within 100 miles of the border", because
PAL channel spacings aren't the same as NTSC either.  Spectrum
allocation would be real headache.  You can build a PAL system that
uses the same channel spacings as NTSC, avoiding channel allocation
problems, but then you get the same horizontal resolution as NTSC.

European PAL gets greater vertical resolution by using 50 Hz instead
of 60 Hz vertical sweep, but if you choose 50 Hz in Canada you obsolete
all of the existing B&W receivers, plus all of the equipment belonging
to the TV stations.  If you choose to use a 60 Hz vertical sweep for
compatibility with existing Canadian equipment, you end up with exactly
the same vertical resolution as NTSC.

You can still standardize on PAL colour encoding instead of the NTSC
standard, which would make U.S. programs watchable only in B&W in
Canada, but there is no resolution difference anymore.

There may have been nationalist arguments for choosing an incompatible
system, but I find it hard to believe that it would have been
a good compromise technically.