PAL-M is the analogue TV system used in

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

since 19 February 1972. At that time, Brazil was the first

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sou ...

n country to broadcast in

colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...

Colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...

TV broadcast began on 19 February 1972, when the TV networks Globo and

Bandeirantes The ''Bandeirantes'' (), literally "flag-carriers", were slavers, explorers, adventurers, and fortune hunters in early Colonial Brazil. They are largely responsible for Brazil's great expansion westward, far beyond the Tordesillas Line of 1494 ...

transmitted the Caxias do Sul Grape Festival. Transition from black and white to colour, however, was not complete until 1978. Two years later, in 1980, colour broadcast nationwide in Brazil was commonplace. It is unique among analogue TV systems in that it combines the 525-line 30 frames-per-second

System M A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and expresse ...

with the PAL colour encoding system (using very nearly the

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

subcarrier frequency), unlike all other countries which pair PAL with 625-line systems and

with 525-line systems.

Origins

NTSC being the "natural" choice for countries with monochrome standard M, the choice of a different

system poses problems of incompatibility with available hardware and the need to develop new television sets and production hardware.

Walter Bruch Walter Bruch (2 March 1908 – 5 May 1990) was a German electrical engineer and pioneer of German television. He was the inventor of Closed-circuit television. He invented the PAL colour television system at Telefunken in the early 1960s. In add ...

, inventor of PAL, explains Brazil's choice of PAL over NTSC against these odds by an advertising campaign Telefunken and

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is ...

carried out across South America in 1972, which included colour test broadcasts of popular shows (done with TV Globo) and technical demonstrations with executives of television stations.

Technical specifications

PAL-M signals are generically identical to North American NTSC signals, except for the encoding of the

carrier. Both systems are based on the monochrome

CCIR System M CCIR System M, sometimes called 525–line, monochrome NTSC or NTSC-M, is the analog broadcast television system approved by the FCC (upon recommendation by the National Television Systems Committee - NTSC) for use in the United States since ...

standard, therefore, PAL-M will display in monochrome with sound on an NTSC set and vice versa. PAL-M is incompatible with 625-line based versions of PAL, because its frame rate, scan line,

subcarrier and sound carrier specifications are different. It will therefore usually give a rolling and/or squashed monochrome picture with no sound on a native European PAL television, as do NTSC signals.

PAL-M systems conversion issues

PAL-M being a standard unique to one country, the need to convert it to/from other standards often arises. * Conversion to/from NTSC is easy, as only the

carrier needs to be changed. Frame rate and scan lines can remain untouched. * Conversion to/from PAL/625 lines/25 frame/s and SECAM/625/25 signals involves changing the frame rates as well as the scan lines. This is achieved using complicated circuitry involving a digital frame store, the same method used for converting between NTSC and the 625/25 standards. The fact that the colour encoding of PAL-M and PAL/625/25 is the same does not help, as the entire signal goes through an A/D-D/A conversion process anyway. However some special VHS video recorders are available which can allow viewers the flexibility of enjoying PAL-M recordings using a standard PAL (625/50 Hz) colour TV, or even through multi-system TV sets. Video recorders like Panasonic NV-W1E (AG-W1 for the USA), AG-W2, AG-W3, NV-J700AM, Aiwa HV-MX100, HV-MX1U,

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

SV-4000W and SV-7000W feature a digital TV system conversion circuitry. Some recorders support the other way around, being able to playback standard PAL (625/50 Hz) in 50 Hz-compatible PAL-M TV sets, such as the Panasonic NV-FJ605.

PAL 60

The PAL

system (either baseband or with any RF system, with the normal 4.43 MHz subcarrier unlike PAL-M) can also be applied to an NTSC-like 525-line picture to form what is often known as "PAL-60" (sometimes "PAL-60/525," "Pseudo-PAL," or "Quasi-PAL"). This non-standard signal is a method used in European domestic VCRs and

DVD player A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to ...

s for playback of NTSC material on PAL televisions. It's not identical to PAL-M and incompatible with it, because the colour subcarrier is at a different frequency; it will therefore display in monochrome on PAL-M and NTSC television sets.

Technological obsolescence

SBTVD and ABERT/SET tests

The analog PAL-M was scheduled to be supplanted by a digital high-definition system named Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital (SBTVD) by 2015, and finishing in 2018. From 1999 to 2000, the ABERT/SET group in Brazil did system comparison tests of ATSC, DVB-T and ISDB-T under the supervision of the CPqD foundation. Originally, Brazil including Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay planned to adopt the DVB-T standard. However, the ABERT/SET group selected ISDB-T, after field-tests results showed that it was the most robust system under Brazilian reception conditions. Therefore, SBTVD was replaced by the Brazilian variant of the ISDB standard, ISDB-Tb, which features SBTVD's characteristics into the originally-Japanese digital norm.