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Fifty Years of Color Television
peter303 writes "The Houston Chronicle notes that color TVs were first manufactured on March 25, 1954 at a price of $1000 (about $4000 in today's dollars). Some of the older folk here remember the excitement of your first neighbors acquiring one of these in the 1960s and as the TV series one-by-one switched to color. Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV."
Yea, but when will slashdot get some new colours too?
...and there's STILL nothing on!
1669 hours... a perspective:
If you are awake 16 hours per day 1669 hours is 104 days, not "just" 70. Apparently, on average, adults watch TV 29% of their waking hours. If you work/commute 45 hours per week, your "free time" is, if you do nothing else, about 9 1/2 hours per day, of which, on average, you watch TV 4 1/2 hours.
So the average adult uses more than half of their available time watching TV.
Pretty sad.
Amy
Actually, there have been numerous quality improvements, though they have come in the receivers, rather than in the NTSC standard. The standard itself is rather elegant, and apart from the error that resulted in shifting to a non-integer frame rate (and the problems that has created for designers of hardware for decades), it has proved very robust.
--- Bill
Cheeky buggers.
I remember when business desktop computers first went to color. First the IBM PC and then the Mac (technically I suppose the Apple ][ was a business machine). "Ah," I thought to myself, "this will never catch on..."
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV.
Was HDTV really even necessary? Our tax dollars were spent mandating its deployment, our money will be wasted purchasing the receivers (which are going to have to be in all TVs), and what does it do for us? Nothing.
We worry about the effects of lack of exercise, overeating, diabetes, etc, yet we mandate better TV signals and are double paying for it.
My dad recalls (born in 1952) when his neighbors got color TV and he remembers everyone on the street tried to get in the house to watch it.
He remembers one time when it broke and the whole neighborhood pitched in to fix it...
Sure there has been an improvement..... I no longer have to watch scrambled p0rn. That is a hell of an improvement
Evolution or ID?
They did it right back then. Good technology (lasted 50 years), allowed the market, not the government, to push adaptation. Somehow I doubt we will still be using HDTV (at least what the current incarnation is) in 50 years.
Last time I was in Britain, I made some comment to a cousin of mine about their wide-format TV and all the shows that are shown in that format. She responded "Yeah, we just go that last year, we're so far behind North America". Boy was she surprised to hear that we're still years away from that change over here!
And of course the fact that PAL is higher resolution that NTSC, and we realize how little has changed in this past 50 years. Why exactly has it taken North America so long to change to a better format? I'd imagine the HDTV change will happen almost overnight, much like the DVD revolution, but it sure took a while for the quality of TV to step up a notch.
Now if they could only do something about what's actually ON the tube.... or, um.. the flat panel?
What changeover in 2006? HDTV is being broadcast now. At least here in Boston, most broadcast channels are available in HDTV. Much like in the 60s when shows were switching over to color, the same trasnition to HDTV is taking place now.
What do you mean. All the computers I ever used were color. The first was green and black. The second was amber and black (shudder). Later systems that I used had eight colors. Woo hoo.
That's sorta an Alanis Morissette definition of Irony ... dontcha think?
Forget HDTV, where is our Smell-o-vision?
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Can you provide a link to this "non-integer frame rate" please? Sounds interesting. Thanks!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
actually, the quality hasn't changed, back even further than that. since color tv was to be able to be forwards and backwards compatible with black and white, the color signal was hacked into the black and white standard.
this was not the case in britain, where a new, but incompatible, standard was created, that used bandwidth more effectively, and had better color.
so hdtv is the first new standard since about 1939. it's about damn time.
this proves, once again, that standards are a double-edged sword. use and choose carefully...
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I don't know about the TV image qualities where you are, but Cable TV certainly improved image qualities. Ok, ok, this is not an improvement on image quality, but on transmission, but to the people sitting at home, it didn't make a difference. Why do I bring it up? Because Cable TV allowed for additional channels and offered image quality good enough that people are willing to pay to subscribe to it. And quite frankly, no matter how good the pictures, if you don't have good transmission/reception, it's still pretty crappy.
I never complained about the quality. I'm pretty sure few people have. I tried digital cable for three months and thought is sucked. Interrupted movies. Pixelated scenes. Heck, did that with an antenna withought coughing up $80/month.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Black and white wasn't enough for me, I guess...
My mom recalls me, as a toddler, telling my dad to "make Big Bird yellow".
In more recent years, Tivo is my second most favorite enhancemenet to television.
I find no confort in being able to watch "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" in HDTV...
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I don't have a TV!
I spent a good many years watching that set and actually being oblivious to the switch to color (when we got another floor model) I wonder about the radiation I was exposed to from that first set, as radiation concerns were pretty lax back then.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The drive is to move to digital terrestial.
This uses a LOT less bandwidth than analogue signals do. Enough less that they can switch to high definition (to sell it to people as an advantage) and STILL have plenty left over.
Once the old analogue bands are free of signal, they can be resold to mobile phone companies for vast profit - and enable full wireless broadband access to the internet.
government mandated changeover. that could spell the end of this T.V. fad. Less than 100 years in the history of mankind can definately be considered a passing fad.
I for one welcome our new "Kill Your Television" overlords.
2006 is a noteworthy point because the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has mandated a changeover from NTSC to ATSC by the end of 2006, provided that the technology has achieved 85% market penetration by then.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
Are you referring to my Gamecube monitor?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I think TV has more to do with what is ON it, not what is IN the TV electronics.
Programming quality has greatly improved since even the 1980s, and so has the picture/colour too, in my opinion. The cameras are sharper, and don't produce as many streaks when they move in dim areas.
The quality of the TV electronics has declined if anything. Now that they are made in Mexico, instead of places where quality was a desirable feature, I hear lots of people complaining they die within a year. Plasma TVs for instace only have a lifespan at maximum of about 7 years, compared to I suppose ~15 for CRTs. I have two working 20" colour TVs that are both at least 15 years old.
I would rather watch a fuzzy show I like, than a sharp/crystal clear show of some tiresome comedy like Everybody Hate Raymond.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Glad to see the money saved on highway construction went to good use.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
No, we older folk remember the intruduction of wireless radio, you insensitive clod!
But what about digital TV broadcasts, we've had these for a few years, and they've certainly made a big difference to the old analogue signal. Plus there's also audio improvements including Mono -> Nicam Stereo, and Doly Digital 5.1 broadcasts through digital satellite transmissions (using Sky+ for example). AND we also have receiver improvements, including CVBS -> S/Video -> RGB -> Component, and 100Hz TVs, widescreen TVs...
unless they create the need, no one will buy it. most people are pretty happy the way things are, so if the TV companies can sell them poor technology at a high price they'll keep doing that. it's just economics; until people quit being satisfied with buying the cheaper product, the demand for a better technology will be nonexistant. it's starting to exist now, slowly.
Yes I can remember seeing color TV in the late '60s, but it wasn't until the mid '70s when my family finally replaced our old black & white TV. A lot of people held off saying they'd wait "until color is perfected." In my memory, color didn't look reliably good until the '80s.
-- Boycott Shell
To say that there have been no major quality improvements in color television isn't entirely correct. The televisions themselves have implemented better and better filtering algorithms and can better lock onto signals than they used to. Color realism has gotten better with newer TV's to project more fleshy tones and more accurate color temperatures.
Then there have been improvements in the means of broadcasting signals. Cable TV was introduced, and not too long after was followed by satellite reception (with their appropriate receivers), both of which improved the strength of the signal and integrity of the image. In more recent years, digital cable and satellite hit it big, and allow for near-perfect signal quality and picture integrity.
The only thing that hasn't really changed up to this point has been the resolution, and this has partly been a result of how well the TV market took off after its introduction. It's hard to change a standard once it has been in place and is used by everyone. Optimally, it would be nice if there was a way to allow HDTV signals to continue to be received by regular definition TVs so that broadcasters wouldn't have to maintain separate equipment, but the technology is so much different that it would be impractical. This is why the introduction of HDTV has taken so long.
KappaStone
maybe $40 Canadian dollars.
Anybody double checks this figures, or they come out of somebody's ass.
It's just digital (i.e. no more analog broadcast). Hopefully there will be a lot more HD content by that point, though.
I suspect the number of charged particles shot at viewers has been reduced.
Radio Shack's COLOR COMPUTER was way ahead of the first color IBM PC's. If Radio Shack had pursued this unit and not tried to be an IBM look-alike, they could have captured the whole market. Remember, Radio Shack was the only real Electronics Store for years. With a consumer store in every town, they were in a position to reach the public like no other company in the US. Too bad they did not have the insight at the time.
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV Have we suddenly moved further into the mysterious future?
I recall as a kid anxiously waiting for our new color set to arrive so we could watch the premiere of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" in color.
Of course, that old set lastest for DECADES. My last two TVs have lasted a combined total of 7 years.
I feel old now.
You used to be able to put a magnet up to a B&W TV and distort the picture temporarily. That was fun. Then along come these color TVs that when you put a magnet to them it premanently makes sections of it all red, blue, or green. Bah! That's not fun.
If im correct ??
The current standard has been around for 50 years because it's "Good enough". Nobody saw (and still, few people see) a reason for switching to higher resolution television. I suppose it would be nice for your hardware to show movies in hi-res, but who can honestly say they can't wait to see The Simpsons broadcast in hi-res?
"Was HDTV really even necessary?"
It probubally wasn't necessary.
"Our tax dollars were spent mandating its deployment, our money will be wasted purchasing the receivers (which are going to have to be in all TVs), and what does it do for us? Nothing."
The TV industry had to do some new product so increase thier pocket books. Why not use lobbiests to get a law for a change and force people to change. THe average person wouldn't change if they weren't forced. It's just a way to have a garuntee see for a product.
Evolution or ID?
What exactly does that mean? 85% of all homes own an HD set(fat chance)? 85% of all broadcasts are available in HD format (possible but unlikely)?
. . . on March 25, 1954 at a price of $1000 (about $4000 in today's dollars).
:)
Ouch. There's an argument against keeping your retirement savings in bills stuffed in a mattress.
Since the birth of the US, the dollar has depreciated by 95% of its value (that's 2000% inflation). A dollar used to be defined as 1/20th of an ounce of gold, and now it's around $400/oz.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
From Ed Reitan's web site http://www.novia.net/~ereitan/. ...brig
-- When I grow up I'd like to be a systems defenestrator.
>Support Free Music! [sharingthegroove.org]
...thanks.
Hi, a comment about the website in your sig: I visited it and could not figure out quickly what the site is/does. The main page doesn't describe it, and the FAQ starts off with user account details instead of any kind of overview. If it's your site I'd recommnend a rethink; if it's not yours but you want to promote it, you might want to suggest the same to the folks who run it.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3604/doesnt_own_telev ision.html
From the Onion
CHAPEL HILL, NC--Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers--as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.
Above: Jonathan Green, who tells as many people as possible that he is "fully weaned off the glass teat."
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television," Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted TV. "I don't even own one."
According to The Inflation Calculator What cost $1000 in 1954 would cost $6468.58 in 2002 and I know teh US hasn't been dropping prices of late.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
After 50 years of technological advances, don't you think we'd have some better programming to show for it?
I mean, I think we could do a little better than 5 more years of Survivor.
God, that show makes me want to get stabby with the CBS Execs.
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV.
Assuming HDTV actually switches over in 2006...
I would argue that there were two major quality improvements in TV with the advents of video tape and digital compression. The first was a revolution of time, since people could now watch what they wanted when they wanted regardless of when the stations/theaters were showing it. The second enabled a revolution in distribution, as it allows cleaner transmission in smaller channels and arbitrary additional content. This is mainly manifested in DVD but is equally applicable to digital cable, video on demand, and online distribution (legal or otherwise, with anime fansubs and other non-domestic shows being the most striking application). Thanks to digital tech you can bundle on a ton of extras, edit with ease, and lower the cost of distribution and replication to inconsequential levels.
HDTV is a nice improvement in video quality to theater-grade levels. But the video and digital revolutions are far more significant, and will continue to trump HD where both can not be accomodated. After all, what matters the most is not the presentation but content.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
IIRC the changeover is merely to over-the-air broadcasts, and would be of DTV and not necessarily HDTV. In other words, providers could digitally broadcast standard-definition (480i) signals if they chose to do so, which would be better than analog 480i, but it's definitely not high definition (720p, 1080i/p). They would do this so they can broadcast more standard definition signals on the same allocation of bandwidth that they would otherwise use up with one HD signal.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
We're not switching over to HDTV. The FCC said we're switching over to digital broadcasting. Antenna signals, instead of being broadcasted analog as they are now, will be compressed. This means you can have about four channels to every one analog channel we have now. There's also an improvement in quality.
These images are 4:3 and at a resolution of 640x480, standard TV format. All you'll need is a new television with a decoder built in, or an external decoder for older TVs.
HDTV, can use the space of one or two of these digital channels to produce a much higher resolution picture at a 16:9 (widescreen) picture size. To recieve these images, these also need a digital decoder and a widescreen television. HDTV is a feature, not a requirement.
Hell, looks like nothing's changed since 1936!!!
One interesting part of the development of color tv relates to the YUV color space used. This color space calculates color by the difference between two of the channels, the third channel is the detail. So BW tv's just ignore the color channels and color tv's add them in. YUV in roughly the same as the LAB color space used in Photoshop. Open a photo and convert it to LAB, then look at the channels. Rather brilliant solution, huh?
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
40,00 channels and only 150 of them have anything good on
Now they are nearly universal, in more than 98 percent of homes. And, increasingly, in cars.
Now Americans can combine their two favourite passtimes, polluting and watching TV!
toresbe
BTW, they even did 3D TV around the same period.
Needless to say few people ever purchased Baird televisors, the picture quality was even worse than NTSC.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Nothing highlights the amazing cost that has been aquiring HDTV like this.
$1000 then / $4000 now for the first round of color TVs?
It was something like $10000-20000 for the first round of HDTVs. In the last year they were just now coming down to the $4000 range, especially if you count the cost of the HDTV tuner as part of the TV cost.
Today you can get them for sub-$1000 but not with a tuner so far, which puts it at a minimum of $1200 for full HDTV.
How long did it take before the broadcast networks considered color to be "it"? I know in the early 80's I was still watching on a B&W tv about 1/2 the time. -Good- color quality didn't really happen until the late 80's.
That is 30 years for a full transition.
Makes the time it has taken to get HDTV adopted (2 years before it is considered defacto, probably 10 more before you get rid of the majority of old color boxes that are using downscan converters) to be alot less painful than people usually make it sound.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I don't watch TV.
I work on my computer.
I'm an above average adult.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As someone who is extremely interested in DV production, HDTV and more specifically HD DV are going to be a boon to the industry.
Consumer and pro-sumer cameras are going to get a whole lot better in terms of color sampling and resolution. The ability for the start-up movie maker or videographer to turn in a superior product will prove to be much better with this technology, also.
I don't know how much different the standard is for HDTV between different countries, but I'm sure if pros and the like don't have to choose between NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, there will also be quite a few happy people out there.
*runs*
Area Man
-- taking over the world, we are.
I believe that our status as a "high-tech" country caused this lack of change in TV technology. High-tech doesn't just apply to what we have in theory or in labs, it has to do with what the common person actually owns.
We have a huge installed base of TVs. Practically everyone has one or three. This is an immense amount of inertia to overcome, and it isn't conducive to rapid or frequent changes in basic technology.
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
Here are some links to the history of television.
Must've been a technology leap for the porn industry. No more black & white cock, but cock in true, full color!
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
Meanwhile, another friend of mine's dad was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley to develop the Trinitron tube. Sony ended up with the manufacturing rights because not one of the 5 U.S. television companies was interested and the Europeans couldn't manage the manufacturing difficulties.
When you add in the time that
1) folks spend watching movies
2) the time folks listen to radio (especially
while driving)
There is also the time folks spend reading newspapers or magazines-which aren't quite as passive a media--or the mass market websites/wire services.
Now, granted, a lot of folks turn the TV or radio on as background noise while they do something else. Still, we are really looking at a culture that is completely immersed in mass media--the overwhelming majority of which is sponsored by various corporate organizations with their own agendas.
This is because Johnson, and then Nixon, gave the American taxpayer's wealth to the rest of the world, first raising the value of gold to $35 an ounce, then finally removing the hard-link all together. Why? To magically make poorer countries wealthier.
The US has bled down the value of its dollar, it doesn't "just" depreciate.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
In my rural southern community, we all gathered at the house of a neighbor to watch the first community TV in a white person's house. That's when I first learned that a wrestler's arm can be twisted through three complete rotations and not come off. (Wrestling has hot changed in fifty years either!) Incidently the first color TV in the community appeared in the house of a black share-crop farmer. "Big" and "Lil" and two other brother's did all right for themselves. I was jealeous as a kid, but later came to be proud of them for the hard work that kept them out of poverty.
I think it's when 85% of the people in the broadcaster's market are capable of receiving the digital signal. You don't neccesarily have to have an HD set to receive the digital signal, either.
... in which case that number will be met much sooner, forcing the broadcasters to vacate their analog channels, in turn forcing those that depend on them to either get a converter box, new tv, or subscribe to cable.
Now, the FCC chairman has been saying lately that he would like to include cable subscribers where the cable company converts the signal to analog as counting toward that 85%
Anyway, like all new technology, first they trumpt the technology itself. I remember NBC shows beginning with the colorful peacock logo and the voiceover saying, "The following program is brought to you in living color," a sentiment that today makes you think, "Duh!" but back then meant something new about the tech. That's the typical arc for technology. First they talk about the tech, and then the tech just melts into the background and nobody thinks about how it happens, they just enjoy that it happens.
In theory, the quality should have been OK, and perhaps it was in a studio, on a high-quality monitor, via closed circuit.
In practice, the home receivers of the late 1950s and 1960s were lousy. They were very temperamental beasts. They had no built-in degaussers and if you moved them or turned them you'd get color changes due to the earth's magnetic field.
The tube circuits were unstable and drifted. They had no ability to compensate for any signal variation, so colors shifted from program to commercial, from program to station break, from program to program, and sometimes from camera to camera within a program. You were constantly leaping up to fiddle with the contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue adjustments.
The tubes were never properly converged (and had about seventeen tweaks needed to converge them).
The picture tubes were circular rather than rectangular and cut off significant parts of the picture. The phosphors couldn't deliver much brightness, so they couldn't put the usual neutral tint in the CRT face; a set when turned off looked pale grey rather than dark. When turned on, room light washed out the colors (and if you turned the brightness up the picture looked even worse).
They were trophies and icons of conspicuous consumption, but it wasn't much fun watching them. I've often suspect that at least part of the reason for the popularity of the Disney show is that animated cartoons were relatively unharmed by slight color distortions.
In the 1970s, solid-state circuits and the introduction of various AGC and other automatic-adjustment features finally brought home receivers to the point where they were worth watching.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Stations can keep broadcasting in both standards later than 2006 if fewer than 85% of the viewers in their markets own the necessary equipment to receive digital signals. If they meet the 85% mark (fat chance, I agree), then they can turn off the "old fashioned" signals and the bandwidth will be auctioned off.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
You know, the broadcast flag feature. That alone will kill Digital TV.
What's next?:
-No channel skipping during commercials?
-No mute during commercials?
-Involuntary channel changes?
-Can't turn off the TV during commercials?
-Mandatory commercials during power on?
At that rate they should just make the precious controled-content pay-per-view then but don't touch my remote after that!
They want complete control but don't want to pay for the TV. Who's TV is it anyway? I paid for the dawn thing! Keep your MPAA/RIAA/xxAA hand off my Frelling remote!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
You could broadcast anything in HDTV an say it's HDTV, but that's just like saying "I'm going to sample this audio file sampled at 44.1 khz and sample it at 10 MHz, and say that it's better quality than the 44.1 khz file. It has to be HDTV from beginning to end (which I very highly doubt with the exception of a select few such as Discovery Channel and such). We're getting hosed...
I still say color TV is a fad!!!
The RCA CT-100 tv actually had a 15" picture tube
not a 12" as the article stated.
No no no, its the Amiga monitor!
-- benton.
Glory be, there are sorcerers here on this board!!!
Now, Hi-def video games... THOSE will be cool.
"Why is it that every time we have an article even remotely related to TV, we get the same people complaining that Americans watch too much TV"
For the same reason any group of people makes a fuss about their existence: to demonstrate a viable alternative. It's unusually common to believe that everyone else thinks the same way you do. That's why people stick to small talk- to avoid the complications and emotions that come out of discovering this other person you want to like (or at least tolerate) is the opposite to you in all the areas you truly value.
For the sake of completeness, I'll say: TV sucks, SUVs suck, malls suck, SSRIs suck, laziness and obesity sucks. I've tried them all and abandoned them all. So there.
This is the marketplace of ideas, isn't it?
>> Ironically, for such a high tech nation...
Advanced is not high tech, witness the "foot" and "inch" units imbroglio occuring almost only in the US.
Not to be rude, but most of the American population lives outside of the dozen larget cities, and the transition outside those cities will be much slower to come. And HD, as opposed to SD, offers little attraction to the smaller broadcasters, who will have to spend a fortune to rebuild their plants, yet will not be able to increase their commercial rates to compensate.
--- Bill
The XBox already supports high-definition.
From what I understand back in the b&w days ntsc was a solid 30 fps per second, and when switching to colour it became 29.97. I read some article about it talking about 29.97 drop frame. Never really understood it. Can someone explain it in laymens terms? And when they show old b&w stuff, do they need to slightly slow it down to 29.97?
And to think I could have been spending that wasted time creating lego churches instead.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
In '65... and all the cool TV shows of the era... "Combat", "12 O'Clock High" were still in black and white!!
But what really kills me... I remember my mother letting me stay home from school to watch all the Gemini launches in *color*... and now I see shows on the History Channel about Gemini and the film is black and white!! I REMEMBER color! Where's the color!!
Actually, I was making the canonical slashbot response of "it's still all NAZI propaganda"! The NAZIs were great technocrats...
NTSC was first standardized in 1954, before that the resolutions were below 525 horizontal lines (x60 vertical) and non-standard. The 1936 model you cite is 190 lines.
Maybe six hours a night, we'd drag string around the living room, goof around with the fether duster, throw things back and forth, etc. The beast, very aloof even for a feline, got more attention in two weeks than she probably had in the previous six months.
Man, was she pissed when we got that TV back.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The headline here is not quite right. Before there was RCA Dot-Sequential color, there was CBS Color. A bit of broadcasting history.
dude- i posted this last year? huh?
while i can be rightfully accused of repeating what i say, i can assure you that i am not doing it in an attempt to karmawhore.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Color TV is quite a cool hack, when you think about it. The color encoding that they used, YIQ, allowed for backward compatibility with black and white television.
You could always lobby your congressman to bring in a law requiring every TV owner to pay an annual license fee to fund public broadcasting. He'd laugh at you, of course, but it'd be funny just to see the look on his face. "Quality public broadcasting?" he'd say, "The market doesn't want it, therefore it shouldn't exist!"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Today is MY birthday! I'm 21 today!
Does this mean that color television and I have a cosmically significant relationship?
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1951%20CBS%20Color2.htm
Was HDTV really even necessary?
Depends on who's asking and who's answering. A useless question, it's here.
Our tax dollars were spent mandating its deployment
That does suck.
our money will be wasted purchasing the receivers (which are going to have to be in all TVs)
Now you lost me.
First, you don't have to buy a TV. It is a luxury.
Second, you can keep your current TV as long as the receiver you have will output a lesser signal for you. Many do.
Third, HDTV technology has become more and more affordable, and will continue to do so just like DVD did, and just like every other technology like this has done. That it has been mandated to the broadcasters that pay the government for the right to exclusively use 'our' airwaves is one reason the cost will go down on the equipment. Shit, I get my HDTV receiver for an extra $6 a month to my cable operator, and that includes almost a dozen HD channels. (TW central florida.)
what does it do for us? Nothing.
So don't buy it. I, however, love my HDTV.
We worry about the effects of lack of exercise, overeating, diabetes, etc, yet we mandate better TV signals and are double paying for it.
Again, I don't get your point. I find it amazing that your post was rated +5 Insightful. I'd go for -1 Confused if I had points.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Wasn't the inventor of Color TV a mexican engineer? I seem to remember the story of the man, traveling to the US to get funding for this project, because the mexican government didn't believe him and wouldn't support him economically.
But I read the article and he's not mentioned. I think his initials were G.C., there's a national TV station named after him here in Mexico (XHGC)
"Years from now, it will be the internet, and then after that people will waste time on the holodeck."
Notice that no one complains about people having too much sex.
Why does everyone keep saying that we will all have HDTV in 2006. There is nothing mandating an upgrade to HDTV (16x9 1080i) in 2006. What is mandated is that the broadcasters must use the new spectrum for a digital signal, DTV. It could be 4x3 480i and probably will be. Broadcasters will probably prefer to output four SDTV signals (they can slice up the bandwith that way) than one HDTV signal. For one thing they can probably generate more ad revenue that way.
It does? THe Xbox supports component video, but I don't think the output is 1080i or 480p. And even so, the game resolution of the gfx is the equivalent of 1280x1024?
Grandpa : "The pictures, THEY'RE ALIVE!"
Never mind, I found an article detailing the story of the inventor:
/ co ntent.html
http://www.lomcximo.com/english/people/camarena
WITHOUT MONEY
He claimed not to have a penny from his inventions, as he had invested all of his money in new research.
Can the inventor of the first color television be Latin American?
In 1940 at the age of 22, Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena obtained US Patent
No. 2,296,022, which protected his "Trichromatic" system used for color television transmissions.
Gonzalez Camarena was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1917.
In 1932, after two years of studies, he left the mechanical-electrical engineering program at the National Polytechnic Institute to work as an operator at the radio station of his country?s Department of Public Education.
HIS OTHER SELF
Besides being an inventor, Gonzalez Camarena liked astronomy, he was a connoisseur of archeology and mexican history, played several musical instruments and composed beautiful songs.
In 1934 he built his first monochromatic television camera from scrap materials he got from flea markets.
After his US patent for the color television on August 19, 1940, he registered his invention at the Mexican Office of Patents and Trademarks, No. 10,235, thus protecting himself against plagiarism and prohibited use of his invention in his country.
He immediately went to work, as chief operator, to the radio stations XEW and XEQ in the Mexican capital.
In 1942 he began experimenting with television transmissions from his home, and in 1946 he founded XEGC, the first experimental television station in Mexico, with only two receptors built and installed by himself; one in XEW and the other in the Mexican League of Radio Experimenters.
My ideal is to build economical receptors so that everyone can have one.
In 1948 he established Gon-Com Laboratories to manufacture TV transmission equipment, which he succeeded in exporting to the US two years later.
That same year he invented the first remote control in Mexico, showcased at the Presidential Objective Exposition that took place in the center of the city.
Of specific importance is the first black and white transmission of a surgical procedure by closed circuit television during the 7th Assembly of Surgeons, an experience that was repeated the following year during the same Assembly, but this time in full color.
In 1950, he obtained the right to commercialize Channel 5 in Mexico with the acronym XHGC, where two years later he began operations on May 10th with a Mother?s Day festival; but it wasn?t until August 18th that he began regular broadcasts.
In 1960, Gonzalez Camarena obtained in Mexico and in the US patents for his ?Kaleidoscope?, an innovative color television system that was later improved and protected under a new patent in 1962 as the ?simplified bi-color.?
In 1963, XHGC began the first commercial color transmissions, broadcast to televisions in ten shopping centers in Mexico City, where the general public could enjoy them for free.
Unfortunately, in 1965 Gonzalez Camarena died in a tragic automobile accident.
This brilliant Latin American, without even reaching the age of 50 and working entirely in his own country of Mexico, managed to excel in a field traditionally reserved for scientists in first world countries.
Brian Unger (formerly of the Daily Show, now on NPR's Day to Day) has an amusing commentary looking back at TV today, if that makes any sense... Link.
I see no compelling reason to switch to digital until absolutely the latest point in time. You get the benefits of waiting for better technology and lower prices. There still isn't much on that is worth watching in HDTV or digital now...
I distinctly remember one day watching the tube at home and seeing a MacDonalds commercial that I'd seen dozens of times elsewhere appear in color on our black and white TV!! Obviously, my little primate brain was responding to the cues from the commercial and filling in the bright yellows and reds on Ronald's costume for me. I ran into the kitchen to tell my Mom, but by the time I dragged her into the living room all the colors were gone.
I think we got a color TV maybe a few months after that. Maybe Mom thought it was cheaper than counseling.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
No, that'd be my IIgs monitor: http://homepage.mac.com/arekkusu/GS/snesrgb.html
"He remembers one time when it broke and the whole neighborhood pitched in to fix it..."
Hey! My car is broke. *crickets*crickets*crickets*
I bought an HDTV tuner ($400) and attached it to a standard 19" computer monitor (under $100), so I had a passable OTA HDTV system for under $500. The image size was pretty much the same as the that of the 20" NTSC TV it replaced.
The two downsides were:So I eventually replaced the 19" computer monitor with a widescreen HDTV monitor with integrated NTSC tuner that had been a demo model. Still, the whole thing was under $1000.
Samsung HDTV tuners like mine seem to be selling for under $150 on ebay these days, so perhaps the subject of this post should be "under $250" is possible. Or heck, my cable company says I can rent an HD cable box for an additional $4 month (though I don't know if it has a VGA output), but I'm happy with over-tho-air.
You write your nine symphonies, then you die.
It seems like so much of the tech stuff is about communication: digital tv, email, web sites, pocket phones, pocket video phones, text pagers, online books, online music, electronic books etc ad nauesum.
What about the content?
I'm sure somone else has already pointed out the lack of it on televison.
Do people really talk about anything important on their cell phones, IMs, emails, text pages etc? etc?
We may have more ways to say it, but do we have anyting better/new to say?
Steve
Cause the improvements I've seen over the last 20 years don't qualify as Ironic.
When I was a kid, we got two and a half channels with crummy reception. A few years later, we got a 15 foot dish and watched much better signals before the channels started encrypting....but they STILL had issues with sparklies when sunspots were active....18-32 analog channels on 10-15 satellites, requiring a dish to rotate to get to them. Then we went to an 18" dish that gets 150+ channels on two satellites that don't require repositioning, and all look uniformly good (some compression artifacting) especially when compared to two and a half channels in the late 1970s.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
The XBox already supports high-definition.
Yes, and something like five or six games actually take advantage of it. And none of them are high-profile, decent games. Whooo.
For all intents and purposes, current-generation consoles top out at 480p.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
I'm surprised that there aren't any channels using the DVD anamorphic trick -- a 16:9 image compressed horizontally into a 4:3 frame, allowing the TV to stretch it back to a 16:9 image.
You'd think that IFC or Sundance or some channel "concerned" with the presentation of cinematography would do at least the occasional movie anamorphic, or overnight or something. It would at least allow for better resolution than letterboxing gives -- zooming a 4:3 frame that's only using 60% of the screen is pretty harsh, especially on an analog channel.
Given that it wouldn't require HDTV-type bandwidth, it seems like a reasonable idea, at least part of the time.
Y'all missed the most significant 50th anniversary: Tatertots:
/ lo cal/8267819.htm
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news
I don't know if they were in color or B/W however.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
LoRes graphics had pretty good color; at least 16 colors, and HiRes had color but it was kind of lame and tended to shift depending on the color of the pixel adjacent to it, but those that knew how to use it did a good job of making it look nice, I can remember some great color games in HiRes graphics on my ][+.
Most of the lame monitors Apple sold were monochrome, but the signal itself was color if you hooked it to a color monitor or an RF converter.
It's because the CONTENT, for the most part, blows white hot chunks of suckiness. I need to buy a $5000 HDTV to watch... what, exactly?
--- Ban humanity.
No improvements??!! Don't you remember "vert. hold" and having to adjust that up until sometime in the 80's. IC-based PLL circuitry has really improved TV since the transistor and tube days.
here is another great site : http://histv2.free.fr/
I'd heard that it stood for Never Twice the Same Colour and, until I read some of the above descriptions, I thought that was just a joke.
(Apparently Americans believe that PAL stands for Picture Always Lousy).
For the record the British government is trying to get everyone to use digital television so that they can (once again) extort large sums of money from the mobile phone companies for the frequencies previously used for the analogue broadcasts.
...and watch mass-market entertainment mounted with better, bigger production values.
Problem solved.
However, there is a Survivorlike movie (comming) out. I think it is done like the Scary Movie series.
As for me, I hardly ever watch anything 'made in Hollywood' unless there is a good reason to watch it such as the LOTR film trilogy by Peter Jackson and filmed in thoroughly picturesque New Zeland.
sadly PAL better encodes some saturated colours which means that ads are glaringly brighter on PAL systems (lots of oranges) to try and get your attention much in the same way the audio level gets jacked in the US
Here is an interesting article on the "other" uses for television and other broadcast public media.
y chologicalwarfare.htm
:)
It contains quite a bit of history on the subject.
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/british-media-ps
Food for thought anyway
This is why it floors me that people have these incredible surround sound systems at home--and consider it to be the best 'theatre' experience ever--yet TV pictures haven't improved, really, since they were invented. What's a TV screen resolution--300x400? Awful.
Actually, the problem is that the frame rate is not an exact integer multiple of the 60Hz AC power frequency, which is usually the largest source of electrical noise. It's off by a fraction of a percent; that's why you often see a distortion slowly creeping up the screen about once per minute as the frame rate beats against the power line sine wave. If the frame rate were exactly locked to the power line frequency, the distortion wouldn't move, so you wouldn't notice it.
Uhhh... Okay. Credentials: Former professional video technician (at the SkyDome in Toronto) before being hired to design radar video systems for Litton. Also an avid collector and restorer of early television sets.
In the 1950s, AC power was not universal, especially in rural areas (note the sustained popularity of the "All American Five" AC/DC table radio at that time). Lots of places had DC, and lots of cities had 25Hz power well into the late 1950s. Nor was it necessarily going to be in sync from one town to the next, so you couldn't guarantee that the 60Hz powerline hum could be synchronized with the TV station's 60Hz vertical signal. In other words, you couldn't be guaranteed that the hum was going to happen in the vertical blanking interval (that black bar you see rolling when the vertical hold control is set wrong).
I suspect that the vertical was chosen to be at 60Hz more because the large current draw of the vertical output tube driving the deflection yoke would then be more likely to occur during the charge cycle of the set's filter capacitors, allowing smaller capacitors to be used (cheaper). This of course being a time when electrolytic filter capacitors (in fact, all small parts) were still hand made.
Even more importantly, you should remember that most early TV sets (until the advent of selenium rectifiers in about 1955) had full-wave rectifiers, generally using a 5U4 or similar tube. A full-wave rectifier folds the negative half of the sinewave up to the positive side, which effectively doubles the frequency to 120Hz.
Either way, if the set is operating correctly, regardless of color standard, you will not see any powerline artifacts or ripple. It's when the horizontal system starts to come out of resonance that the biggest current draw happens in the set. Your horizontal output tube (transistor) consumes the most power of any part of the set; if a typical 1950s DuMont or Admiral has a cathode current of 120mA (at ~300V) and you misadjust the horizontal hold, that current will spike to over double that. That will load down the set's power supply, discharge the filter capacitors more, and you might start to hear 120Hz (full wave rectifier at 60Hz) hum in the set's speaker.
IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier.
Yup. The original NTSC standard was 30FPS; when the 3.58MHz sinewave which carries color was added, the bandwidth of the signal had to be increased. (The original was 3.5MHz bandwidth for the image; reducing the frame rate slightly was sufficient to keep the bandwidth inside the original spectrum and didn't screw up many of the existing TV sets.)
Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.
Note that the NTSC color TV standard was adopted in 1953, though not implemented until 50 years ago today. Every TV set built since then has known about the new frame rate the sets would have to handle. I actively collect and restore early TV sets, and I only have a few which predate this - they're rate.
Again, you don't get powerline beat in the picture unless something is wrong with the set's filter capacitors.
If you're getting a beat in the picture which, on a blank raster, moves in time with the vertical hold control, then you've got a problem where the vertical is either consuming too much current, or a
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Japan started broadcasting in HDTV in 1978. Need I say more about technical leadership?
Actually,
Gonzalez Camarena IS NOT the inventor of TV it self, he invented a Color TV Format that was not based on the original B&W TV standard. His format used 12Mhz bandwith rather than the 6Mhz that todays format use, hence NO backward compatibilty. This is what killed his project. His standard however had much superior quality and what he called "true color".
Todays color TV standard was submitted by RCA. Camarena`s color standard was also submitted at the time but not by him, his idea got stolen by other major company in the US (I cant remember which). He didt finally sued because it didnt win anyway so the whole thing died.
I know this cause one of my college teachers was one of his engineering team members.
NTSC was practical for the day and for many years afterward. Can you think of any other standard that works well within technology limitations (mainly storage limitations)? Something that while being far from the most clean sounding or best reproductive of sound, has worked and will likely continue to be used for years?
MP3!
Is it great quality? Well, only at higher bitrates (ie. not 96 or 128 bits) that almost none in the general public uses. Sometimes 'good enough' is good enough.
Swiss chocolate makers used to think that clearly something was wrong with Americans for actually calling Hershey's milk chocolate, 'milk chocolate' when it was clearly not of the same quality of their own. But... It was also not of the same price range.
Pearls before swine, or good 'ol American practicality?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
One big improvement which we are just starting to see is the LCD tv. Once the manufacturers are able to lower the cost and produce LCD TV's with a bigger screen size. We will all be sittin' pretty with nothing on. :)
Did you know it was invented in 1963 check it out by George H. Heilmeier.
"The Revolution will not be Televised"
Dr. Retarded Check out what they have done now.
I was thinking the same thing! Everyone thinks HDTV is mandated, it is NOT.
Digital broadcasts are, with analog broadcasts going away. All the stations could continue to broadcast SDTV digitally and comply with the FCC.
This is the closest this O-C A-R nerd could google up before he got bored with the search.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
We first got colour TV in the late 1970s. My grandfather (who's still alive) was a TV repair man, and he supplied us with TVs that people were getting rid of, and which he'd fixed.
:-) The worst bit of it was that I could never get the colour convergence quite right (you had to take the back cover off the TV and play with about half a dozen controls).
Our TVs were still full of valves (tubes) until 1989. We bought our first semiconductor TV then - a Sony. We lived in quite a weak signal area, and it often meant fiddling with the vertical hold.
Valves take a while to heat up, so you'd turn on the TV, and about 15 seconds later, the sound would start to pick up in volume as the audio parts got up to temperature, and about another 15 seconds later, the picture would start filling up the screen (starting small and gradually widening to fill the screen). I liked it best when you turned them off - the picture would suddenly zoom out, and then dissolve into three blobs - a red, green and blue blob that would persist often for several minutes.
When I bought my first TV aged 16 in 1988, it was a valve TV - I used it as a monitor for my second-hand Sinclair QL. (I bought them both for GBP5 each). Not many people have had the experience of learning 68000 asm using a monitor full of thermionic valves
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
1000 1954 dollars would clearly be worth more than 4000 today. According to the CPI from 1800 to 2004, $1000 from 1954 would be worth $(1000)(1/0.144) 2004 dollars, or about $7000 /nitpick
mechanically spinning (Nipkov) disks with different coulered gelatines.
Which brings me to the CBS color system, alluded to in the article as a experimental system. (It used two spinning color disks. When you switched back to a black and white program, you flipped a toggle to turn the spinning disks off. It was less than 400 horizontal lines, so I imagine it sucked too.)
It was not meant to be experimental, CBS fully intended it to be the color standard. It *was* the chosen standard by the FCC.
But RCA fought back, and fought hard, delaying implementation. The FCC chose the CBS system again in the 1953, but then NBC started broadcasting in RCA color in 1954.
The RCA (NTSC) system was backwards/forwards compatible, a show shown in NTSC color would be picked up by a black and white TV. This was not the case with the CBS system. By 1953, too many people had black and white TV's, which would have needed replacement if the CBS system really won the day.
NBC broadcast color, CBS got cheesed off and wouldn't touch color until the mid/late 60's, and ABC saw no reason to make color programs to encourage NBC/RCA sales. By the mid 60s, ABC saw the potential in color, and CBS had no choice but to follow.
Oddly enough, I've had the reverse experience to most people with DVRs.
I used to have a TV, but only used it with a VCR and DVD player. No live feeds at all. In general I watched roughly 2-3 movies a month. I had a lot of free time, and in general I really had the experience that all the "I have no TV, I'm so superior" folks talk about.. Assorted geek projects like home robot building, etc, benifited most.
Then I worked a contract for TiVo related to their support for DIRECTV dual tuner support. I then decided I wanted to own one of the boxes I'd worked on.
DIRECTV + Tivo == a lot of stuff that I like (mostly Anime and SciFi). Over time I keep finding more and more stuff that I like.
This means I'm watching more and more TV, and loosing all that spare time. I read less, I computer game less, and projects-for-fun have dropped off to almost nil.
If I didn't have a Tivo (or equivalent), then I'd have a lot more free time. I'm totally unwilling to schedule my time around TV shows, and incapable of enjoying shows without an ongoing story line. Without a smart recorder, I'd never know what was going on and lose interest.
As I side note, I'm pretty sure I'd end up watching a lot less over all if I knew the content would always be available whenever I wanted it. A TiVo with unlimited storage would be okay, but something like NetFlix with all content ever produced would be better.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV. We are just switching to digital broadcasts. HUGE DIFFERENCE!!
Come on, I've had bowel movements with more insight.
Actually Color TV is older than 50 years. And it was developed by a mexican engineer.
Some links for you to explore:Ronald knows better
Another history on the subject
Quoted in slashdot on a previous article
I checked the link you mentioned.
Oops.
1969, right after the moon walk.
I remember watching it on our B&W set and my dad tried to take a picture of the set with his 35mm camera, it came out with huge black bands on the screen.
When I was little I liked going to my grandparents to stay because they had a color set and we didn't. Cartoons, Batman, etc. in color was what I lived for. (Now I can see them in color on "Boomerang" and TV land...)
I remember well that most people didn't have color TV in the early sixties because the sets were WAY too expensive.
BTW, that comparison of $1,000 to $4,000 is wrong. The dollar has devalued by a factor of TEN since those days.
380 comments, and no mention of Police Squad!...in Color?
Sad.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
HDTV is not automatically 1080i - there are a whole slew of possible HD formats, and different broadcasters are picking different ones. The only one I know of going to full HD production is going to use 720i. I think there are 14 allowable slots in the matrix of standards, and people are taling about using most of them - and, apparently, Australia is going for a fifteenth.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
If you ever watch a show that was filmed for regular TV but broadcast digitally, you'll see that you're not completely correct. Normally there is some loss in quality between what the TV station has and what they broadcast in NTSC. When they take the same source and send it out digitally, that loss in quality isn't there. I certainly see a significantly better picture with digital broadcast over analog cable for the same shows.
And of course, most new shows are in HDTV now, at least on the the major networks.
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV.
Unless your sysclock is really fast, this is still 2004. So there "hasn't been" 2006 yet.
Share and Enjoy!
Marvin Kitman said it best when he noted that nobody ever stopped watching television in the past fifty years because the quality of the picture wasn't good enough.
"for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV."
So you're saying the non-HDTV visual quality is about the same as it was 50 years ago? I'd have to disagree. I guess you'd have to define "major."
Then you could follow up by defining "is." j/k :P
George Brown's book, "Part of Which I Was" covers the history of his time at RCA. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but he sounds like a good guy.
I got a cheap $25 NAXA portable B&W TV, and :)
nothing connected to it, not even a VCR.
I spend most of my time on my computer programming
and playing games. They have color screens
50 years of color television and now look where we are.
I'm gonna go watch survivor. (HA! In Color!)
Let me guess. You live in the UK, right?
There is nothing on TV that makes you not think.
The Simpsons brought up all kinds of ideas, thoughts, ans stuff to think about. Many people may have chose not to take the opportunity to discuss some issues, but thats not TV's fault.
I challenge you to pick a TV show that there is no opportunity to think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Never Twice the Same Color
Well, no mystery there, with the shit they have on now: Reality tv, movie of the week, music videos, infomercials, 60s sitcom nostalgia networks. Bah, purille crap.
I think the same thing will happen to me if I get a TiVo. I am currently unwilling to arrange my schedule around TV, so if I turn it on and there's nothing on then I just do something else.
And we're stuck watching informercials. Why not devote some of that time for showing old tv programs instead of some dumb-ass hawking their latest piece of crap?
With an upward turn of both my health and the weather I have been off enganging in my penchant for experimental paleoanthropology, specializing in those things which leave no archeological trace. A bit of a nonscience, for, while experimental (like Heyerdal's voyages), they rely on inductive reasoning, since, they leave no archeological trace.
I have been making things with either no tools at all, or with tools that Homo Habilis would have found laughably crude (that rock I done found).
In fact, right now, I'm smoking a "paleolithic" pipe I made out of, and with, only things I found in the parking lot next to my house. A bit of pithy weed ( no, I don't know what pithed it off) for the stem, reamed out with a bit of grass straw, a bit of wild bamboo for the bowl, cut with a bit of slate used as found, drilled with a bit of granite used as found. Finishing work done with the side of the bit of slate used for cutting. The end result looks quite modern, it simply took a bit longer to make than if I had used more sophisticated tools, like worked stone.
Natural fiber textiles at least the equal of modern factory produced materials can be made with no tools at all, just fingers, right from the collection of the fiber to the finished good. I don't think there's going to be much of a market for finger woven woodchuck yarn sweatervests though, no matter how much it looks like a modern, factory made, garment.
Add a tool, a stick to tie the end of the twine/yarn to, and ease and speed of manufacture both go up.
Even though it's an inductive "science" it can still prove illuminating. I've found that many anthropologists believe the daftest shit simply because they hypothesise without trying things. I belong to the "They weren't idiots" school of anthropology. If there are two possible ways of doing something, and it's completely impossible to determine which way from the archeological record, I try it. If it turns out you'd have to be a complete idiot to do it one of the ways, and by complete idiot I don't mean dumber than Australopithicus/Habilis, I mean dumber than that that Butthead who lives next door to me (dumber than your average chimp), than the other way is clearly the way it was done.
I can't prove it, other than by the inductive reasoning of "They weren't idiots," but I think that's pretty good inductive reasoning.
KFG
"Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV."
I've always bought nothing but Sony TVs, and every one I've ever had did a better job than the last with the plain ol' composite video signal. It's like all the stuff that's been done with http that could never have been anticipated by TBL.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
and only recently, they all squeel when turned on. :( Why can't anyone make TVs anymore that don't squeel?
Did You Know That... ...the world's first patent for a color TV was granted to a Mexican inventor?
http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/travel/tonysarticle s/tbdid1003.html
but why did you tie an onion to your belt? ;-)
GENERAL PUBLIC SIGNATURE (GPS) Any replies (derivatives) of this post must also use the GPS
Heh. The butthead kids that live next door to me come up with some of the most ingenuous contraptions for smoking pot. Those kids can randomly pull three pieces of garbage out of the can and turn it into a dang pipe. Of course, once they're done they throw it in the bushes next to my driveway, so I get to examine their handywork. Just goes to show how even the most mutton-headed mook is still capable of amazing craftiness.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Nah, the Butthead next door to me isn't that sort of Butthead. He's mid thirtyish with kids. He always wears white shirts and ties because he likes to. He looks like William Foster. He makes a lot of garbage because if a screw falls out of something "it's broke."
To give you an idea of how little cognition this guy can levy toward creating something, he says he's a programer.
Turns out that means he can use Visual Foxpro and Dreamweaver, kinda.
He works for the state.
He's at absolutely no risk of "Falling Down" because he's underskilled and over educated. He hasn't got the brains for either, or for going crazy.
KFG
The reason why the NTSC color system is in many ways inferior to PAL and SECAM is the fact NTSC color signals had to be viewable on black and white TV sets. This meant compromises had to be made in terms of picture quality.
PAL and SECAM never suffered from that problem because they were never designed to be truly viewable with black and white TV sets. For example, in the UK they used the 405-line black and white standard for many, many years until it was phased out in favor of 625-line PAL color broadcasting.
ATSC digital broadcasts--because of the fact they don't need black and white compatibility--was designed for not only far superior resolution (1080i/720p using the 16:9 aspect ratio) but also far better color clarity, too.
....will be where ATSC 720p/1080i 16:9 HDTV broadcasts finally take hold.
And the key to this are low-profile rear-projection TV's that use Liquid Crystal On Semiconductor (LCOS) technology to get very sharp high resolution at reasonable cost. Thanks to the work of Intel, the price of LCOS could drop extremely fast, and that could pave the way to under US$1,300 rear-projection TV sets (including ATSC digital signal tuner) that doesn't have the limitations of CRT rear-projection TV's or plasma flat panel TV's.
I was trying out a new trolling technique -- accuse a perfectly legitimate post of being an anti-slash repost troll from the Database Tool and see what happens. Didn't look like I got any bites though.
It's more fun to fuck with the anti-slash people than it is to do the same old "ha ha I tricked you into looking at goatse/tubgirl/bearload" stuff.
the article is entitled 50 years of color television
how in the hell is that post offtopic?
Yes, as I know it there are 18 different formats of ATSC. But I argure that only 1080i 16x9 is true HDTV. Maybe 16x9 720p. Nothing less is HDTV, ie widescreen 480p is not HDTV. My progressive scan DVD player does that and it doesn't hold a candle to 1080i.
I was referring to going 720p 16x9. It looks as if they are going to be the first with significant amounts of native HD instead of up-rezzed SD.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Yes, well, look for this comment a bit earlier: Why, yes he was mexican by Mex (Score:3) Thursday March 25, @12:49PM
Story goes (I hope and trust that it's true) that at the trials of various competing candidate color systems for Europe (before one was established), the NTSC technicians were busy early in the morning adjusting their equipment, while the likes of PAL techs got up later (maybe!) and simply warmed up their equipment, no daily tweaks required. Story has it that the spoof name originated there.
Enby in Waltham
The red phosphor, iirc, was a sulfide type, and was the best they could do; none too good (poor color).
Good reds were possible only after the invention of europium-doped phosphors. Host crystal was yttrium orthovanadate. IIrc, a woman researcher at Sylvania (?) invented them.
Enby in Waltham
Yea, but when will slashdot get some new colours too?
SLASHDOT: Now available in Octarine!