What is the difference? And why the difference? How can flipping a switch on my VCR make it play either one or the other?
And can you please answer in layman’s terms so I can understand the answer?
Dunno if this helps, but NTSC is usually used for American style products, and PAL is usually used for England/Australian type products, such as the Nintendo 64.
So if you have the switch, you are compatible to both… I guess.
PAL and NTSC are the two most popular standards for transmitting television pictures. I don’t know for sure every place these are in use, but certainly PAL is used in Europe, Australia and NZ, and NTSC is used in North America and Japan. They differ in a number of ways. One major difference is in the number and configuration of pixels, those little dots on your television screen. PAL has more rows and more total dots. Another is in the refresh rate, the rate at which the dots change. NTSC has a faster refresh rate.
This doesn’t just make television sets different, it makes almost everything that has to do with TVs different: VCRs, video cameras, DVD players, video game systems, and pre-recorded video tapes, among other things. (Blank video tapes don’t much care, until you record something on them.) If you have a standard one-system North American television and video player, which understands only NTSC, and your friend in Europe sent you a PAL videotape, you’re kinda screwed. However, multi-system VCRs are becoming increasingly common. These can take a PAL signal and fiddle with it so that it becomes something an NTSC television can reasonably handle. I don’t know how the PAL-to-NTSC conversion works - but we have a VCR that can turn NTSC signals into something our PAL television can live with. It “letterboxes” the NTSC signal, like what sometimes happens when a widescreen movie is reformatted for television, so that it’s basically cutting an NTSC-sized hole in the middle of the screen. And it systematically drops frames to make up for the difference in refresh rates.
Here are some links:
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/WorldTV/compare.html#combinations
http://www.german-way.com/german/paltv.html
http://fribble.cie.rpi.edu/~repairfaq/REPAIR/F_tvfaqe.html#TVFAQE_018
(go to the very bottom of the page for this link)
An excerpt:
"The NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) was responsible for developing, in 1953, a set of standard protocols for television (TV) broadcast transmission and reception in the United States. Other standards were adopted in the rest of the world. The NTSC standards have not changed significantly since their inception, except for the addition of new parameters for color signals. NTSC signals are not directly compatible with computer systems.
An NTSC TV image has 525 horizontal lines per frame (complete screen image). These lines are scanned from left to right, and from top to bottom. Every other line is skipped. Thus it takes two screen scans to complete a frame: one scan for the odd-numbered horizontal lines, and another scan for the even-numbered lines. Each half-frame screen scan takes approximately 1/60 of a second; a complete frame is scanned every 1/30 second. This alternate-line scanning system is known as interlacing.
PAL is short for Phase Alternating Line, the dominant television standard in Europe. The United States uses a different standard, NTSC. Whereas NTSC delivers 525 lines of resolution at 60 half-frames per second, PAL delivers 625 lines at 50 half-frames per second. Many video adapters that enable computer monitors to be used as television screens support both NTSC and PAL signals."
One fundamental reason for the difference is the fact that electrical power is 60Hz in the US, but 50Hz in Europe. Both NTSC and PAL were designed to work in sync with the powerline frequency. Of course, that brings up the question of why the powerline frequencies are different 
Arjuna34
If you are in the US, you can buy a vcr that plays both of them from buy.com, cost? about $800.00 !
Having worked on TV’s and videos some time ago I can do some kind of comparison.
Both systems have their proponents and each has developed their own acronym for the other thus
PAL = Picture Always Lousy.
NTSC =Never Twice Same Colour.
When the composite tv signal is broadcast the colour information which is encoded into it also has a referance signal.
The problem comes when parts of the signal change phase relative to each other.This only comes when either transmitting large distances or through cable networks.
The signal itself occupies a fairly large bandwidth so that some parts are affected a little more than others.
When the colour referance signal moves by only a few degrees the decoder circuitry will extract the chrominance signal slightly wrong.
You have maybe seen those colour charts which are plotted on a rotation with, say, red at twelve o’clock rotating round so that cyan is at four o’clock and so on.
The phase change in the referance signal effectively rotates the twelve o’clock position so that red is at one o’clock and now cyan is at maybe five o’clock.
Result is that colour is rendered wrongly and since phase changes tend to happen in one direction in off air reception things like faces have a yellowish hue to them.
NTSC works this way so that when you are watching the news and they cut to a distant location colour changes noticeably.The advantage to it is that each line is decoded separately so that on a 525 line set you get 525 lines which gives good definition and the colour itself is at full brilliance.
PAL takes the signal from two lines, delays one and inverts it.The important thing to remember is that we are using vector quantities here so each signal has angle and phase, by adding or subracting them the phase discrepancy is cancelled out.
The weakness of PAL is that the colours look washed out as phase error increases and we have effectively only half the colour information.We run on 625 lines but the definition is not as good as US tv and the luminence of the image is usually poorer too.
You pays your money…
Frame rates on tvs in Europe are linked directly to mains frequency, Phillips have a system that can redraw at 100hz.
There has been talk of HDTV at 1125 lines but there was a huge argument over whose technology to use with the French resolutely standing in the way of existing and operating systems, mainly because they were not going to make any money out of it, anyway what do they know - they use SECAM and nobody gives a toss about it.
Roll on true digital!!
I’m sure what casdave days is true but for all practical purposes, PAL was vastly superior to NTSC for home viewing of broadcast TV back in the 70’s and 80’s when people actually viewed over-the-air broadcasts. In the 1970’s, NTSC really was Never Twice the Same Color and people spent a lot of time either adjusting their color sets or looking at people who appeared to have otherworldly complexions. I believe the NTSC color situation improved greatly in the late 1970’s when digital tuners became common and some reference color signal was introduced so that TVs would do some sort of automatic correction. Nevertheless, into the 1980s the typical European TV picture was vastly superior to the typical U.S. picture. I used to spend time whenever I went to Europe watching dumb shows and marvelling at the quality of the picture. Did you know that in the background of stage shows (e.g. Ed Sullivan type shows) there is actually a curtain made of fabric that meets a stage made of wood? You never would have been aware of it watching American TV but on European TV you could see the cutain stage with its all their smudges and marks. For that matter, you could see the smudges and marks on the faces of the performers.
I assumed that superiority of the PAL picture was the 625 vs 525 lines per frame but according to an article I read back then, the difference in quality was not due to inherent differences in the systems but due to the fact that in Europe, where, at that time, you were lucky to have four channels, both broadcasters and viewers spent a lot of time and money optimizing their broadcasting and reception whereas in the States people were much less fussy. The author claimed that the situation in Japan proved his point because there, with the Japanese being as fussy as the Europeans, TV picture quality was as good as in Europe despite the fact that they were using NTSC like the Americans.
By the time I made it to Japan in the 90’s, to check out their TV, I didn’t notice much difference. But by now tuners are vastly superior and almost all the TV I watch, whether in Japan, Europe, or the States is via cable.
Getting back to the original question, just flipping a PAL/NTSC switch on your VCR isn’t going to let you watch a PAL tape on your American TV unless either (1) your VCR actually does a conversion (which isn’t likely unless you spent a whole lot of money) or (2)you have a multisystem TV.
(Regarding flodnak’s TV: For some good technical reason, it is fairly easy for a PAL TV to display an NTSC signal so a lot non-multisystem PAL TVs will display NTSC but NTSC TVs won’t display PAL signals.)
Strictly speaking PAL and NTSC refer to the B&W signals (before there was any color) and the difference mainly is (as has been said) in frequency. Before color you could pretty much adjust a (B&W) set from one to the other. When color was introduced the schemes used were entirely different and sets became totally incompatible. Strictly speaking PAL and NTSC do not refer to the color signals, just the basic B&W but they are generally used to refer to the whole thing.
There are several flavors of NTSC and several flavors of PAL too. Check out:
http://www.tenlab.com/worldtv.htm
http://www.calfilm.com/list.htm
http://www.4p8.com/lounge/ntsc.htm