The counting of received pixels in TV receiving systems

Comparison of different HDTV transmission systems is very difficult. Main reason is that up till now these systems have not been available side by side for subjective tests on critical scenes. Objective criteria that determine the picture quality of a system have not been found yet. One could state that a calculation of the number of transmitted pixels is probably a rather bad way to determine the-subjective-quality of a transmission system. This quality will for instance also be determined by motion artifacts, flickering, aliasing etc. Nevertheless, counting the number of pixels might be the only ´comparison on paper´ that is possible. That is why-be it with some hesitations-an attempt has been made to compare the number of received luminance pixels in NTSC, PAL, MAC, MUSE and HD-MAC.<>