NTSC (from National Television System Committee) is the first American standard for analog television, published and adopted in 1941.[1] In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M. It is also known as EIA standard 170.[2]
In 1953, a second NTSC standard was adopted,[3] which allowed for color television broadcast compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers.[4][5][6] It is one of three major color formats for analog television, the others being PAL and SECAM. NTSC color is usually associated with the System M; this combination is sometimes called NTSC II.[7][8] The only other broadcast television system to use NTSC color was the System J. Brazil used System M with PAL color. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos used System M with SECAM color - Vietnam later started using PAL in the early 1990s.
Since the introduction of digital sources (ex: DVD) the term NTSC has been used to refer to digital formats with number of active lines between 480 and 487 having 30 or 29.97 frames per second rate, serving as a digital shorthand to System M. The so-called NTSC-Film standard has a digital standard resolution of 720 × 480 pixel for DVD-Videos, 480 × 480 pixel for Super Video CDs (SVCD, Aspect Ratio: 4:3) and 352 × 240 pixel for Video CDs (VCD).[9] The digital video (DV) camcorder format that is equivalent to NTSC is 720 × 480 pixels.[10] The digital television (DTV) equivalent is 704 × 480 pixels.[10]
^Federal Communications Commission (September 29, 1954). 20th Annual Report to Congress (1954)(PDF) (Report). p. 90. Archived(PDF) from the original on May 8, 2024. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
^National Television System Committee (1951–1953) (1953). Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12-19, with Some supplementary references cited in the Reports, and the Petition for adoption of transmission standards for color television before the Federal Communications Commission (Report). LCCN54021386.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)