Countries using pal format? - Answers

PAL is the color encoding system developed by the British and Germans. It differed from the American NTSC encoding system in several ways and the two are not directly compatible. Because of the British links to the rest of the world, most British colonies (currently or previously) use PAL. This now extends to most of Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The Americas and the far East tend to be NTSC regions but for a full list, there are many web sites that show every country and the formats they use. France chose a different format when it began color broadcasts, known as SECAM. Although SECAM is still used for the final broadcast, all television production uses PAL format for ease of signal processing. The content is converted to SECAM for distribution to viewers. Several of the French colonies still use SECAM although the format is becoming less popular. With the advent of high definition television, PAL, NTSC and SECAM are no longer used. Each of them are color encoding systems for standard definition signals only and encoding for HD does not use them. However, HD is still often incorrectly referred to as PAL or NTSC. Partly, this is due to the fact that NTSC uses a 60Hz frame rate while PAL uses a 50Hz frame rate. The move to HD has retained the differing frame rates. HD PAL therefore is more properly known as 50Hz HD.