PS-1 PAL-NTSC & 4:3-16:9

[retroborg]

Hello.
I have a few Technical questions.

Are the PAL SONY PS-1 default display in 4:3 & the NTSC PS-1 in 16:9?
Or are the 4:3 & 16:9, completely irrelevant with the PAL & NTSC signals?
Technically, what are 4:3 & 16:9 and what do they mean?

That’s all.
Thanks in advance.

[midzt]

4:3 and 16:9 are the ratio the the lengths of the screen are in. The first being width and second being height. So if i screen were to be 1:1 it would be square. 4:3 is the original box TV and 16:9 is widescreen.

I think they should be irrelevant to PAL and NTSC.

[retroborg]

Thank You very much.
That cleared things up.

[directhex]

they're irrelevant, basically

worth noting is that NTSC is lower resolution than PAL, so some extremelyt badly localised games can have black borders on PAL versions, where the image is simple compressed. whis was very common on the SNES

[Spud1]

and common on the n64 too =)

PAL and NTSC also have different framerates too - PAL is 25 all the time, whereas NTSC can be 23 or 29....Its a right headache when your encoding dvds etc

[retroborg]

What are the exact resolutions of PAL & NTSC?

The frame rate of PAL is 50HZ & NTSC is 60HZ?

What are the technical specs of the 2 signals?

Thanks in advance.

[directhex]

720x576 for PAL, 720x480 for NTSC

frame rates are correct, though this is interlaced & usually half speed - i.e. 25 frames per second for PAL, 30 for NTSC. that said, most movies are 24 FPS, and this can be easily upmixes to 29.997 with NTSC which more or less works - as well as it being possible to mix 30 and 24 on the same NTSC stream.

it's messy.

but on the whole, think 25 for PAL, 30 for NTSC, 24 for movies.

http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/Article.../PALvsNTSC.asp has some info.

[Rave]

they're irrelevant, basically

worth noting is that NTSC is lower resolution than PAL, so some extremelyt badly localised games can have black borders on PAL versions, where the image is simple compressed. whis was very common on the SNES

It was very common on the Megadrive and Saturn too. The easy fix on the Saturn (and I assume on the MD, never tried it) was to fit a 50/60Hz switch to the jumpers- this also solved the problem of the game playing 20% slower than it should have done.

720x576 for PAL, 720x480 for NTSC

<pedantry alert> Well, that's true for DVDs. The CCIR and RS170 b+w standards were formalised a long time before Digital TV was even thought of; so in fact the standards are just 625 scan lines (575 viewable) x 25fps for CCIR (PAL and SECAM) or 525 (485 viewable) scan lines x 29.997fps for RS170 (NTSC). The horizontal resolution depended entirely on the quality of your analogue recording/broadcasting/receiving system.

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/video/rs170.html

frame rates are correct, though this is interlaced & usually half speed - i.e. 25 frames per second for PAL, 30 for NTSC. that said, most movies are 24 FPS, and this can be easily upmixes to 29.997 with NTSC which more or less works -

Well, most films are converted to PAL simply by playing them 4% faster- compare the runtime of a 2 hour movie on PAL VHS or DVD to the runtime on the IMDB and the video always come up about 3-4 minutes shorter.

NTSC encoding uses a system called 3-2 pulldown (or something). Basically it repeats (or cuts- I forget) a frame 5 times a second so motion doesn't look absolutely linear. It's pretty hard to spot if you're not actively looking for it though.</pedantry>

Rich :¬)

[directhex]

pedantry is fine, it means the question is answered with a minimum of effort & research by me \o/