The first widescreen TV sold in the United States was the Thomson Consumer Electronics RCA CinemaScreen, released in 1993.[10]In Europe, the PAL and the French SECAM Standard Definition systems employed higher resolutions than the US NTSC Standard Definition system, which meant the quality issues of letterboxed or matted movies on TV were not as severe.[11] There is also an extension to PAL, called PALplus, which allows specially equipped receivers to display a PAL picture as true 16:9 with a full 576 lines of vertical resolution, provided that the station employs the same system. Standard PAL receivers will receive such a broadcast as a 16:9 image letterboxed to 4:3, with a small amount of color noise in the black bars; this "noise" is actually the additional lines which are hidden inside the color signal. This system has no equivalent in analog NTSC broadcasting.