Originally Posted by VirusKiller
Incidentally, Sky HD channels viewed via SCART (576i) usually look a lot better than their SD counterparts, which just goes to show that PAL is actually capable of very good results (though not as good as native HD) when the theoretical bandwidth available to the PAL format is not compromised by MPEG compression. The Sky Sports channels are a good example.

There are exceptions to this as certain Sky HD channels show horrendous MPEG blocking.

Not sure what PAL has got to do with this? Short of seeing a true analogue broadcast, PAL is not involved.

PAL is colour encoding not the TV format although it is sometimes incorrectly labelled as such - ie PAL DVD's are not PAL, the term PAL is simply an incorrect shorthand to describing the frame rate and number of lines.

It may frighten people, but composite video is capable incredible results too. When I was at the BBC 15-20 years ago, the majority of our computer graphics output was via composite backbones simply because RGB was too expensive (and suffered timing/skew issues due to the long transmission lengths) to pipe around TV Centre. I think we ran 5 composite feeds and 1 RGB feed from our paintboxes and short of using a scope or having to use a matt/CSO (chroma key) with an unfriendly colour, you could not tell the difference even with grade 1 monitors short of an A/B test when differences were minimal and then you fixed the problem with a fringe suppressor to clean up the edge of the matt.


Meridian owner since 1992
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