NTSC (from National Television System Committee) is the first American standard for analog television, published in 1941. In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M. It is also known as EIA standard.In 1953, a second NTSC standard was adopted, which allowed for color television broadcast compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers. It is one of three major color formats for analog television, the others being PAL and SECAM. NTSC color is usually associated with the System M; this combination is sometimes called NTSC II. The only other broadcast television system to use NTSC color was the System J. Brazil used System M with PAL color. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos used System M with SECAM color.
The NTSC/System M standard was used in most of the Americas (except Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay), Myanmar, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, and some Pacific Islands nations and territories (see map).
Since the introduction of digital sources (ex: DVD) the term NTSC has been used to refer to digital formats with number of active lines between 480 and 487 having 30 or 29.97 frames per second rate, serving as a digital shorthand to System M. The so-called NTSC-Film standard has a digital standard resolution of 720 × 480 pixel for DVD-Videos, 480 × 480 pixel for Super Video CDs (SVCD, Aspect Ratio: 4:3) and 352 × 240 pixel for Video CDs (VCD). The digital video (DV) camcorder format that is equivalent to NTSC is 720 × 480 pixels. The digital television (DTV) equivalent is 704 × 480 pixels.
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