Editing NTSC (section)

== Comparative quality ==
{{More citations needed|section|date=March 2020}}
[[File:SMPTE Color Bars.svg|thumb|300px|The [[SMPTE color bars]], an example of a [[Test card|test pattern]]]]

For NTSC, and to a lesser extent, PAL, reception problems can degrade the color accuracy of the picture where ghosting can dynamically change the phase of the color burst with picture content, thus altering the color balance of the signal. The only receiver compensation is in the professional TV receiver ghost canceling circuits used by cable companies. The vacuum-tube electronics used in televisions through the 1960s led to various technical problems. Among other things, the color burst phase would often drift. In addition, the TV studios did not always transmit properly, leading to hue changes when channels were changed, which is why NTSC televisions were equipped with a tint control. PAL and SECAM televisions had less of a need for one. SECAM in particular was very robust, but PAL, while excellent in maintaining skin tones which viewers are particularly sensitive to, nevertheless would distort other colors in the face of phase errors.  With phase errors, only "Deluxe PAL" receivers would get rid of "Hanover bars" distortion.  Hue controls are still found on NTSC TVs, but color drifting generally ceased to be a problem for more modern circuitry by the 1970s. When compared to PAL, in particular, NTSC color accuracy and consistency were sometimes considered inferior, leading to video professionals and television engineers jokingly referring to NTSC as ''Never The Same Color'', ''Never Twice the Same Color'', or ''No True Skin Colors'',<ref>Jain, Anal K., ''Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing'', Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989, p. 82.</ref> while for the more expensive PAL system it was necessary to ''Pay for Additional Luxury''.{{Citation needed|date=May 2024}}

The use of NTSC coded color in [[S-Video]] systems, as well as the use of closed-circuit composite NTSC, both eliminate the phase distortions because there is no reception ghosting in a closed-circuit system to smear the color burst.  For VHS videotape on the horizontal axis and frame rate of the three color systems when used with this scheme, the use of S-Video gives the higher resolution picture quality on monitors and TVs without a high-quality motion-compensated comb filtering section. (The NTSC resolution on the vertical axis is lower than the European standards, 525&nbsp;lines against 625.) However, it uses too much bandwidth for over-the-air transmission. The [[Atari 8-bit computers|Atari 800]] and [[Commodore 64]] home computers generate S-video, but only when used with specially designed monitors as no TV at the time supported the separate chroma and luma on standard [[RCA connector|RCA jacks]]. In 1987, a standardized four-pin [[Mini-DIN connector|mini-DIN]] socket was introduced for S-video input with the introduction of [[S-VHS]] players, which were the first device produced to use the four-pin plugs. However, S-VHS never became very popular. Video game consoles in the 1990s began offering S-video output as well.