A Progress Report on Improved NTSC

In the past few years, the NTSC system has been subjected to considerable scrutiny by various researchers in an effort to squeeze every bit of potential picture performance from this well entrenched color standard which now serves more than 30 countries, and hundreds of millions of home receivers. — This paper will describe a variety of recent developments that extend the usefulness of the NTSC signal format into the Advanced Television arena that is now of such great interest to television futurists. — The improvements to be described affect all aspects of NTSC operations, including signal origination, videotape recording, professional and consumer displays, and some of the propagation problems associated with program delivery. The areas to be explored and defined include the new high performance consumer VCRs which employ unique processing circuitry to achieve picture quality superior to the best of current terrestrial broadcasting and cable delivery. In addition the authors will look at how the image display can be made to simulate HDTV performance through the use of line doubling and advanced motion interpolation techniques. — The overall attempt of this paper is to give an overview of the various areas of NTSC image generation, processing, distribution and display, which can be improved substantially by the application of a variety of recently developed techniques. The demonstrable result is that a fully expanded NTSC system can indeed be used for many years to come as a fully compatible Advanced Television System, while the ultimate all-digital television broadcast system is under study and development.

Published

1989-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00744

ISBN

978-1-61482-918-8