In addition to looking identical, they also have the same amount of tape on the inside.Ĭommon PAL to digital questions Are PAL tapes only VHS?

There are a lot of technical ways to explain the difference between a PAL tape and a NTSC tape, but we won’t get into that. This new encoding system became a thing in the 1950s when the standards of NTSC encoding were insufficient due to the potenial for poor transmission in Western European countries that created a lot of issues with color, so PAL was developed to work around that. Video tapes are universal, so even if yours are labeled with NTSC, if they were recorded on a PAL configured camera then they were encoded as PAL tapes. You’ll see that your tapes likely all say NTSC, the US system. PAL (Phase Alternating Lines) is a system of color encoding for analog video that was used almost everywhere BUT the United States.

If you answered yes to one or both of these questions, then you might have some PAL tapes! The good news is that we can absolutely Convert PAL format tape to DVD, and the so-so news is that there is no good way to know which tapes are PAL if you don’t already. You can visit our standard video transfer service page if you don’t have any PAL tapes. If you answered no to both of these questions, it’s very unlikely that any of the video tapes you have around are PAL format tapes. Have you or a member of your family ever lived abroad?ĭid you or your family ever travel outside the United States with your video camera on a family vacation?

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