SECAM

SECAM, also written SÉCAM (French pronunciation: [sekam], Séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for sequential colour system with memory), is an analogue colour television system that was used in France, Russia, and some other countries or territories of Europe and Africa. It was one of three major analog colour television standards, the others being PAL and NTSC. Similar to PAL, a SECAM picture is made up of 625 interlaced lines and displayed at a rate of 25 frames per second (except SECAM-M). However, because of how SECAM processes colour information, it is not compatible with the PAL video format standard. SECAM video is composite video; the luminance (luma, monochrome image) and chrominance (chroma, colour applied to the monochrome image) are transmitted together as one signal. All the countries using SECAM have either converted to Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), the new pan-European standard for digital television, or are currently in the process of conversion. SECAM remained a major standard into the 2000s.