Ideologies
of transmission
Richard Banghart As
if you didn't have enough acronyms I'm about to give
you three more. They are NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. These
acronyms refer to different television systems used
around the world today. Here, in the United States,
we use NTSC. NTSC was the first color television system--created
in 1953. It was developed to be compatible with the
earlier black and white system. Essentially, what NTSC
allows is the addition of color to the existing transmission,
while permitting black and white only receivers to be
unaffected by the additional color information. Although
newer televisions and improved broadcast transmission
have obviated the need for some of these controls, the
NTSC system requires color televisions to have hue and
color intensity controls. With the hue control you can
change the color of faces from red to blue to green
and any color in between. With the intensity control
you can remove all color (returning to a black and white
picture), add a little tint of color, or make the color
as garish as a comic book. The ability to control color
is so great that NTSC is said to stand for Never Twice
the Same Color. By contrast, the PAL system (used in
most of Europe), offers only a color intensity control,
while the SECAM system offers no color controls at all.
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