For anybody considering installing a first rate security system, either in their home or within a business, understanding the differences in security cameras and signals that they use to process their images can be very important.

Security camera signals ?much like television signals ?come in different types of signals NTSC (National Television System Committee ) and PAL (Phase Alternating Line)

Get the wrong security camera signal type and the whole system could be useless.

Generally speaking, Phase Alternating Line or PAL cameras, just like television sets, are made to make use of older-style analog television signal encoding systems that are mostly found in broadcast television networks.

In this case, "networks" refers to the schematic and system set up to beam signals to equipment made to handle these kinds of signals.

There are certain regions in the world that made great use of PAL which, like NTSC, is being phased out in broadcast television in favor of digital encoding.

Historically, over 120 countries have used or are still using what is known as terrestrial PAL systems. This includes much of Europe, great chunks of South America and most of the former Commonwealth countries, including Australia.

It's important to understand, when it comes to getting a security camera system, whether the system and the cameras are set up to handle phase alternating line or some other sort of broadcast signal (and there are several different kinds).

One of the most popular kinds in the Western Hemisphere is NTSC. It's generally the predominant analog broadcasting system used in North America, Central America and certain parts of South America along with Japan and South Korea along with a couple of other small Southeast Asian countries.

Generally speaking, being able to tell whether a camera is rigged for NTSC or PAL use is as easy as looking at the label on the side of the camera.

By law and international agreement, all broadcast-related electronics such as televisions or cameras must inform whether or not they are one system or another or are capable of being switched between both.

Usually, it would be highly unusual to see PAL-rigged cameras being sold in the Americas and NTSC cameras being sold in Europe, for example.

There really is nothing all that esoteric about PAL when it comes to security cameras.

All that really does is regulate how the video information and color information of the video signal is received and then translated.

Though PAL and NTSC share many similarities, there are differences in how many frames per second or shot along with color tinting.

The issue, when it comes to ensuring that the complete security camera system is either PAL or NTSC or some other standard for analog broadcasting (SECAM is also popular) is that a camera that is built to handle PAL will not generally work when it's integrated into an NTSC system and vice versa.

At the least, it will not work very well at all, leaving any picture almost completely unreadable. When it comes to security camera system, this failure to integrate a camera properly could lead to serious issues.