10 Nov
2000
10 Nov
'00
4:01 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 06:34:41PM +0100, Hans Franke wrote:
Hmmm. Well mine is a Hitachi from the early 90's (93 maybe?) and
was kindof high-end for the time, but not sold as a multi-standard
VCR (those kind are still expensive even now, here in the US). I
use an Electrohome projector for my TV, so wouldn't be surprised
if it is pretty forgiving about the video input.
In Europe multi-standard VCRs may be more common because they are
much more necessary.
Do they automatically detect what kind of tape is being played
or is there a switch to select it? If they detect it, I wonder
how it's done.
I also found a FAQ on the web that says it won't work at all:
http://www.cmc.com/lars/dansk/videofaq.htm
Speaking of
PAL... a couple weeks ago I got a VHS movie (Barber of
Siberia... I'm trying to learn Russian and thought it might help) on ebay,
played it on my NTSC VCR, and noticed that the picture looked funny;
people's faces looked like melting plastic, and high-contrast edges were
somewhat haloed, etc. Then I noticed the box was labeled PAL. So I'm
wondering if it was dubbed to NTSC (with poor quality), was the wrong box
for the tape and was actually NTSC despite the labeling, or if my VCR
actually managed to play a PAL tape, with the quality being the result
of the higher-bandwidth video signal going through lower-bandwidth NTSC
electronics, and probably also speeding up the movie by 20% or so?
I didn't think NTSC VCRs could play PAL tapes
at all.
Well, if it is a Japanese VCR, chances are good that it can
play both. They have only a few designs, and they are made to
cover all relevant Standards with only minor modifications
(additional software, different modulators/filtering) The same
is true for most TV sets. At least over here in Europe vitualy
every TV and most VCRs found are able to play both, often all
three standards (PAL, SECAM and NTSC). Just for the lower price
units these features are sometimes disabled.
Your description looks like a pure colour problem.
Meaning what?
The halo effects are somewhat like what happens when you hook up a
high-res RGB monitor using a cheap VGA extension cable. So I thought
bandwidth compression could very well explain it.
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