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Television is 100 years old today

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Re: Television is 100 years old today

#221

Post by account42 »

sosomoxie wrote: post #64

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

While not entirely thematically unrelated, being electric puts it distinctly outside of steampunk and even dieselpunk. I don't think anyone would call The Matrix steampunk but CRTs are at the center of its aesthetic. Cassette Futurism is the correct term I believe though it also overlaps with some sub-genres of cyberpunk.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#222

Post by account42 »

mrandish wrote: post #212
sosomoxie wrote: post #64

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

It's worth deep diving into how analog composite broadcast television works, because you quickly realize just how insanely ambitious it was for 1930s engineers to have not only conceived, but perfected and shipped at consumer scale using only 1930s technologies. Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around com…

It's interesting how early digital video systems were influenced by the analog aspects. DVDs were very much still defined by NTSC/PAL even though the data is fully digital.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#224

Post by account42 »

cf100clunk wrote: post #73
fecal_henge wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.

Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.

That doesn't match my experience of deliberately dropping an old CRT monitor off the roof. Implosions are unfortunately not as exciting as explosions.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#225

Post by account42 »

charcircuit wrote: post #176
pinnochio wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're getting awfully close to recreating CRT qualities with modern display panels. A curved 4:3 1000Hz OLED panel behind glass, and an integrated RetroTink 4K with G-Sync Pulsar support would do it. Then add in a simulated degauss effect and electrical whine and buzzing sounds for fun.

>1000 Hz This sounds like a brute force solution over just having the display controller read the image as it is being sent and emulating the phosphors.

A 1000 Hz panel does not imply that the computer has to send 1000 frames per second.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#226

Post by account42 »

rhplus wrote: post #179
tzs wrote: post #174

I've sometimes wondered how things would have been different if the TV pioneers had went with circular CRTs instead of rounded rectangles. Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily m…

I would guess that even at the time a circular viewport would have seemed a bit weird and so rectangular was preferred. After all, theater stages, most windows, photographs and books - all common place - aren’t circular either.

Futurism of the time was all about round shapes though.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#227

Post by account42 »

Dwedit wrote: post #46
iso1631 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally you had 30fps, it was the addition of colour with the NTSC system that dropped it to 30000/1001fps. That wasn't a decision taken lightly -- it was a consequence of retrofitting colour onto a black and white system while maintaining backward compatibility. When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher ban…

60 interlaced fields per second, not 30 frames per second. The two fields do not necessarily contribute to the same frame.

Which unfortunately also has continued to plague us much longer than we have used any display technology where that might have made any sense.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#228

Post by account42 »

talla_unica wrote: post #117
Avalaxy wrote: post #87

Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive. Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years…

Over here in some European countries TV license fee is mandatory even if you don't own a set. The licence funds watchable content, so it makes sense to have one. (I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system). Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netfli…

> The licence funds watchable content

If everyone agreed with that you wouldn't have to force them to pay the license and could sell subscriptions instead.

> I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system

I don't. At least they don't have to pay for their propaganda.

> Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers.

That's like saying dumpster diving gets you better food than the sewers.

> On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.

Weird tangent when there are plenty of computer monitors based on non-CRT technologies. If CRTs were still being made today they wouldn't have any less anti-features.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#229

Post by account42 »

Avalaxy wrote: post #87

Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive. Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years…

I have a device marketed as a TV which I use to watch movies as well as serial entertainment that was originally released on television. I don't use any kind of broadcast, cable or streaming service though.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#230

Post by account42 »

grishka wrote: post #211

Having just finished my software-defined analog video decoder[0], I've gotta say, my mind is thoroughly blown by just how much of an engineering achievement television must've been at the time when it was invented. It must have also been the first ever communication system to have backwards compatibility. [0] https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...

Cool project. Anything in particular that you use it for? There are some great films or TV series that were never released in digital form and some more where the digital releases were butchered in some way (e.g. cropped) compared to the original analog broadcast / VHS / Laserdisc releases.
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