The difference between the time it takes for the chrominance portion of the signal to pass through a system and the time it takes for the luminance portion to pass through.

The amount of distortion is expressed in units of time, typically nanoseconds.

The number is positive for delayed chrominance and negative for advanced chrominance. This distortion manifests itself in the picture as smearing or bleeding of the color particularly at the edges of objects in the picture. It may also cause poor reproduction of sharp luminance transitions.

Any signal containing a 12.5T sine-squared pulse with 3.579545 MHz modulation can be used to measure chrominance-to-luminance delay distortions. Many combination signals such as FCC Composite and NTC-7 Composite contain this pulse.