More people than ever before are now security-conscious in ways they may not have been just a decade ago.

However, awareness of the need to guarantee security in buildings and even homes has meant that the popularity of security camera systems has never been higher.

There's no great mystery to these cameras, though understanding the ways in which they receive or broadcast signals such as NTSC is important.

Standing for "National Television System Committee," NTSC is the authorized analog broadcast encoding system for much of the Americas (except for Brazil and a few other countries), Japan and South America and a couple of smaller SE Asian nations.

Though most of the world is now moving to digital broadcast signals, it'll still be the case that NTSC or its European counterpart PAL ("Phase Alternating Line") electronic equipment like televisions and cameras will be quite common.

Knowing something about not only the region in which the security camera system is going to be used by also how those two systems (there are actually 3 different analog systems, with the other being called SECAM) process their analog signals can be vital, if only to make sure the right set of cameras is being used in the right region.

The main thing to remember about NTSC is that it has a way to control tint so that correction of color can be corrected manually.

PAL doesn't. NTSC also has a different line and refresh rate, meaning that the picture signal refreshes on a different scale than does PAL.

Much of this has to do with what's called "frame rate conversion," NTSC cameras run frames at nearly 30 frames per second versus the slower 24 frames per second in an NTSC camera.

Because of this, some claim that NTSC cameras can capture more of the action and that it'll be sharper, though the naked eye really can't tell the difference.

Most security experts would say that the big benefit would be when any videotape is reviewed frame-by-frame, of course. If there are more frames, there's more information, in other words.

It's usually not advisable to mix or mingle cameras that feature different methods for decoding and encoding analog broadcast signals, such as one would find in PAL and NTSC cameras.

In some cases, a single camera inserted into the system can throw off the whole system. In other cases, signal quality will be degraded though not enough to completely ruin the quality of the images created.

It's easy enough to tell the difference between PAL and NTSC cameras.

One only need look at the equipment, which is required to publicly declare on a label or advisory that it is either PAL or NTSC or able to make use of both systems.

Neither system is usually seen in the other's broadcast region, though, so any mix up would almost have to be deliberate in order for it to occur.

Digital broadcasting and encoding systems are gradually taking over the marketplace, so expect to see the gradual disappearance over time of analog equipment capable of sending and receiving these signals.