What is the difference between PAL and NTSC ?
NTSC:National Television Standards Committee. The NTSC sets United States TV and video standards. The NTSC TV standard defines a composite video signal with a refresh rate of 60 interlaced half-frames per second. Each frame contains 525 lines and can contain 16 million different colors. To use on most PCs today, special video adapters are needed to convert computer video signals to conform to NTSC standards and vice versa. PAL:Phase Alternating Line. The PAL TV standard defines a composite video signal with a refresh rate of 50 half-frames per second where each frame contains 625 lines. To use on most PCs today, special video adapters are needed to convert computer video signals to conform to PAL standards and vice versa.
Europe and Australia are PAL (as is a big part of Asia, most of Africa and a large part of South America). NTSC U/C is the US and Canada and NTSC-J is Japan. Basically each region has a standard television mode. This mode determines the resolution of the picture, the frequency of the picture, how many lines make up each picture and how many frames per second each broadcast has. What version you get always depends on where you live as explained above. If you import games though then you need to have a converter or a compatible TV as the picture can be in black and white (if you view NTSC U/C with a PAL TV) or scrambled (if you view PAL in NTSC) so you need to make sure you have something compatible.
