DigitalVideoAndHDTVAlgorithmsAndInterfaces.pdf

Concerning the absence of D-4 in
the numbering sequence, see the
caption to Table 35.2, on page 423.
Cable television is detailed in
Ciciora, Walter, James Farmer, and
David Large, Modern Cable Television
Technology (San Francisco:
Morgan Kaufmann, 1999).
Eight-bit sampling of NTSC at 4f SC has a data rate of
about 14.3 MB/s, roughly half that of 4:2:2 sampling. In
1988, four years after the adoption of the D-1 standard,
Ampex and Sony commercialized 4f SC composite digital
recording to enable a cheap DVTR. This was standardized
by SMPTE as D-2. (Despite its higher number, the
format is in most ways technically inferior to D-1.)
Several years later, Panasonic adapted D-2 technology
to 1 ⁄2-inch tape in a cassette almost the same size as
a VHS cassette; this became the D-3 standard.
D-2 and D-3 DVTRs offered the advantages of digital
recording, but retained the disadvantages of composite
NTSC or PAL: Luma and chroma were subject to crosscontamination,
and pictures could not be manipulated
without decoding and reencoding.
D-2 and D-3 DVTRs were deployed by broadcasters,
where composite encoding was inherent in terrestrial
broadcasting standards. However, for high-end production
work, D-1 remained dominant. In 1994, Panasonic
introduced the D-5 DVTR, which records a 10-bit
Rec. 601, 4:2:2 signal on 1 ⁄2-inch tape. Recently, VTRs
using compression have proliferated.
Composite analog SDTV
Composite analog 480i NTSC and 576i PAL have been
used for terrestrial VHF/UHF broadcasting and cable
television for many decades. I will describe Analog NTSC
and PAL broadcast standards on page 571.
Composite analog 480i NTSC and 576i PAL is widely
deployed in consumer equipment, such as television
receivers and VCRs. Some degenerate forms of NTSC
and PAL are used in consumer electronic devices; see
Consumer analog NTSC and PAL, on page 579.
CHAPTER 12 INTRODUCTION TO COMPOSITE NTSC AND PAL 109