In terms of colour TV formats, the US uses NTSC and Australia uses PAL. Could this be an issue in purchasing a compact digital camera from the US? I see on some websites that, in their specs, some cameras are designated NTSC or PAL.

PAL and NTSC are formats for analogue TV and are in the process of being phased out. So unless you have a really old analogue TV to play your videos on I wouldn’t make much bother either way. If you have a modern digital TV they should be able to play anything.

pesce.del.giorno said:

In terms of colour TV formats, the US uses NTSC and Australia uses PAL. Could this be an issue in purchasing a compact digital camera from the US? I see on some websites that, in their specs, some cameras are designated NTSC or PAL.

I thought those systems only had reference to analog TV, which is gone.

I’ll have look around.

Yep, pretty much gone.

Wiki says mostly it’s now DVB-T, streamed as an MPEG transmission.

That’s in Oz, the septics are different (of course).

Iirc, new Zealand were very forward thinking and use mpeg4 that allows better compression without perceived loss. I wish oz did that, too. All that extra bandwidth availabily would actually allow for a decent digital picture.