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The First High-Definition TV, Circa 1958
An anonymous reader sends us to Gizmag for a look at a recent auction of a large collection of antique TVs. The star of the show was the Teleavia type P111, one of the earliest examples of high-definition TV. This rare 1958 console-stand television was designed by Flaminio Bertroni, who was also responsible for the iconic Citroen DS. The TV featured dual resolution capability, with the higher setting offering better resolution than 720p — 819 lines. This early attempt at a high-def standard, originating in France in 1949, didn't catch on in the marketplace.
> But what I want to know is, why hasn't anyone mass produced a Thin CRT yet?
They've been prototyped -- 10 years ago, I was convinced that the future of television was the Field Emission Display (FED) after I saw a demo at CES. Absolutely *beautiful*. The best of all worlds. Bright, saturated, distortion-free, and viewable from angles just like a regular CRT.
Basically, coat a sheet of glass with colored phosphors, and put individually-addressable solid-state electron sources behind them. To light up a particular phosphor group, turn on the emitters behind it to make it glow. Unfortunately, the technology went nowhere. :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_emission_display
I wouldn't doubt that (you can certainly fit a feature film's worth of 1080p on a dual layer DVD, but copyright holders waited for a more DRM-infected format), but I think bandwidth would have been the bigger issue. Lord knows they didn't have digital compression back then, never mind a decent implementation like h.264. I don't know a damn thing about analog compression, but I imagine that it's all inherently lossy so applying much would defeat the purpose of having the increased resolution in the first place.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
As a frequent pirate of movies, let me just say: 8-9GB for a 1080p movie (in h.264) is not sufficient to make compression artifacts non-noticeable on any decent display. And I've yet to find a codec that is better than h.264.