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Correct it was a german invention developed by Telefunken.
It was designed to be, and IS better than NTSC.

The more lines do mean the better the quality otherwise nobody would have bought S-VHS as it has more lines than normal VHS. As Marcus Allen can no doubt back up - the more lines you have the more detail you can store in a picture. In effect the number of horizontal lines is like counting the vertical pixels. S-VHS is certainly superior to normal VHS. Same goes for video-8 and Hi8.

NTSC is jokingly called Never The Same Colour, because it is not capable of reproducing natural colours as closely as PAL can.

You do seem to talk a bit of nonesense sometimes. You say you must only use Panasonic tapes in a Panasonic machine and Sony in a Sony. Thats rubbish. All DV tapes are manufactured to a specification, therefore all should be capable of doing teh job. For ultimate reliability you should look for thetape with the best magnetic properties which is most likely to be a professional grade tape made by TDK, Maxell, Sony EMTEC etc.
It may interest you to know that Maxell, Fuji and Panasonic blank miniDV tapes are all made by the same manufacturer and simply have differet brand names stamped on them.

No need to sell it to me Giles, I already own one.

i have a cannon xl1s for sale if anyones intrested
only used twice with all boxes ect
two lenses 1 16x and one wide angle not the cheap converter
with a multi bnc rear end pad
chargers and loads of batterys
camera was ?2000
wide angle was ?950 (this lens is a must for shooting in close)
batterys was ?250
rear end ?300
+ lots of bits and peices
i want ?2500 firm
whys it for sale we used to run xl1's and bought this camera to use at the avn in jan ,thats all the use it had . we replaced all our kit in feb and got a better deal from sony.
personally i like the xl1 as it feels better in the hand than a pd 150
and the wide angle is better on the xl1 ,auto focus is better on the pd but the lens on a xl is interchangable and you have to use a converter ona pd
picture quality is about the same on both .

if anyones intrested in the xl email me at phil@pumpkinfilms.com
i can gaureentee its usage
regards phil

I wish I owned one. They are great to use though.

Having more lines is a better idea but neither PAL nor NTSC are really much better than one another and are both quite old analogue systems. If you watch NTSC master tapes it's not possible to tell the difference except from an engineers point of view. The poor reputation NTSC has for colour reproduction comes from bad standards conversion rather than problems with the standard itself. I used to think NTSC was just rubbish but was corrected by an engineer who was training me and he did have about 30 years plus experience. You can only learn new things by listening to people.

You should not use Panasonic tapes in a Sony camera or vice versa because the tapes have a manufacturer specific lubricant on them for use in their own types of camera. If you mix tapes another problem you can encounter is pixelation. In the Sony pd 150 manual it does tell you to use only Sony tapes, I was also told this by the hire company and by the the people I always but stock from. Most tape operators would never touch Fuji or Maxell because they are distinctlly inferior to Sony which you will (almost) always see being used in pro video editing and dubbing houses with the exception of Ampex (Quantegy) which are also good tapes.

I don't think the "tape brand/camera brand" is a problem outside of Sony's PD150 manual. I've certainly never noticed a problem after using many brands of DV cameras and tapes since 1998.
Also, people like myself who own Canon Dv cameras would be stuck as Canon don't make DV tapes.

True enough, when you hear something from several different sources, it's either true or an urban myth, I still wouldn't mix tapes and Sony and Quantegy make the best.