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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.
Just look closely at the fine kerning!
Way ahead of it's time, as well. What a ride!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
. .
The TV featured dual resolution capability, with the higher setting offering better resolution than 720p â" 819 lines.
Nice try, but "by today's standards, it could be called 737i with a maximum theoretical resolution of 816x737 pixels with a 4:3 aspect ratio (10Mhz * 40.8 / 1000 *2 = 816)" Now compare this to the 720p standard which is 1280x720 pixels and a much higher resolution.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
I'm assuming that, in this case, the resolution is defined either by the maximum resolution of the signal standard it was intended to pick up, or by the quality of the circuitry that handled the signal. Infinite resolution on the tube side isn't going to help you if some other component is letting you down, and analog components definitely have finite ability to transfer signals cleanly(as do digital components, those just take the entire hit up front).
As for the unique bit, probably just the "vintage 1958" bit, and not a whole lot beside that.
...if not, then the whole question of resolution is academic, n'est ce pas?
Computer displays are the same way. Twelve years ago I had a vertical resolution of 1200px in a 21" monitor. Today on a 24" monitor, that's still the best sold in any store. It's sickening.
The Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first working television system was talking of a 1000 lines too in the1940's. :) ;)
Nothing new, just a young person thinking wow they could do that back then
The revolution was the sweat shops of Asia and quality control.
Digital HD was a rush, needing real skill. A duct tape effort
http://www.bairdtelevision.com/colour.html
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
As much as I love my 22" widescreen LCD monitor, I still miss the crisp, solid, and reliable CRT. This article is a prime example of why we have used CRT's for such a long time. But what I want to know is, why hasn't anyone mass produced a Thin CRT yet? I'm sure all of you remember the articles posted back in 2004 about Samsung developing a Thin CRT. What the hell happened and why did this idea fall through?
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
...high-definition server, because the regular one is kaputs.
Table-ized A.I.
They had finite bandwidth.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Just as we say today "wow, they had 737i prototypes in 1958!" one day in the future we will marvel "wow, they had 4096p prototypes all the way back in 2002!"
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
They never show it in use or any actual video being displayed on it.
Buffoons! For all I know (being the internet) its just an old TV! SHOW ME THE MONEY!
I'm gonna go play uncharted 2...
So 57 years ago France was already broadcasting 441 lines. I was under the impression, that in the USA, today, that 480 lines were being broadcast and sold as the low end of HD. And that we continue to use 320 line for regular cable / satellite / OTA broadcasts. I could be off a lot in my understanding and was looking for clarification. It just seems amazing that France would have been for all intents and purposes be broadcasting 57 years ago what we American's are being sold as HD TV today (considering how overly compressed current broadcasts are, 441 vs 480 seems like it should be negligible). So, since these seems pretty impossible to me, please point out my flawed understanding. Thanks!
LCD's can be used in LOTS of places, they are simple and reliable and known tech.
Your thin CRT would have a hard sell, they would be useless in laptops, be very heavy and offer what exactly as a benefit?
People want flat, setting up an entire production facility just for TV's and MAYBE computer screens that you will have to sell with "yes we know it is bloody thick and heavy but it looks much better, well, no, you probably can't see it in the brochure but trust us!".
People want flat. I don't think mosts desks could even hold anything but a thin LCD anymore.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Before the deployment of color, B&W TV in France was broadcast in 819 lines.
The French always had their own (superior) TV standard.
When they did deploy color TV, it was the SECAM system, which used
625 lines (like PAL), but had a much better system for color encoding
(though the TV sets were more expensive initially).
Ow...it hurts my eyes...and my brain...
Most of the work I do is page layout, and the typical pages I work on have a vertical orientation
A two-page spread is wide. Try making two windows in your web browser, control-clicking them in the Windows taskbar so that they're both selected, and choosing one of the Tile options. Do this on a 1920x1200 pixel monitor, and it's almost like having two 1024x1280 portrait monitors.
The 819 lines was the standard in France for B&W television, and only gave way when color came about. The standard for color televisions was 625 lines. I am not that old, but 819 lines is what I watched on television while I was a kid.
It's not that hard to do high-definition monochrome TV. You just need to crank up the horizontal sweep rate and use higher-bandwidth amplifiers. Color, though, requires more holes in the shadow mask or stripes on the screen, and the alignment tolerances are tighter.
France had 819-line monochrome broadcast TV in the 1950s. But with the transition to color around 1960, Europe went to a uniform 625 lines. Kind of sad, but making special color TV tubes for France just wasn't worth the trouble.
I think someone didn't take their meds today.
Careful, he'll be throwing chairs again soon!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
That's because your old 21" monitor had an aspect ratio of 4:3, and the new ones have an aspect ration of 16:10 or 16:9. Widescreen 21" monitor will always be shorter in height compared to a regular monitor.
pretty soon you'll be cranking that 24" down to 800X600 and loving it!
Get off of my lawn!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The screens in the black and white tubes didn't limit resolution, but the spots size (focus) of the beam could. In practice that's mainly a problem with very small screens and high brightness levels, as seen with c.r.t.s in projection sets. Those sure could look awful...
In practice the resolution from left to right is limited by the video bandwidth. On a high end analog computer monitor that may exceed 100 MHz. That essentially limits the minimum width of vertical lines.
But unlike the case with analog computer monitors where stored digital pixel information has a corresponding fixed position on a line, a true analog signal can have intensity changes occur anywhere along the line. To approximate that digitally would take a minimum of two pixels being averaged. (It's the same theory that dictates using at least 40 KHz sampling to sample 20 KHz audio). Trying to use too few of digital pixels (sub-sampling) is what causes aliasing (the jaggies). Analog tv does have that problem, but only in the vertical direction due to the fixed line count/position.
In an analog television, the bandwidth is limited not by the video amplifier section, but by the "i.f." intermediate frequency strip of filters/amplification. By mixing the incoming signals with an adjustable internal oscillator, the tv tuner shifts the desired channel down to the intermediate frequency, there the i.f. filters pass the desired signal while attenuating that of the adjacent channels. That design approach avoids the need to retune a whole group of filters just to change channels. (When first done with A.M. radios, the breakthrough was called SuperHetrodyne) To get higher horizontal detail requires wider filters, and tv channels spaced more widely (greater spectrum bandwidth). The use of too much spectrum was the main limiting factor in preventing opting for higher quality analog. Also, a wider channel means more noise bandwidth (more is captured), so higher resolution would require increased transmitter power to get the desired signal to noise ratio (not notice snow).
The U.S. system used A.M. transmission, but with only part of the lower sideband transmitted in order to save bandwidth. Normal A.M. sidebands are mirror images of each other. With that redundant carrying of information, one sideband could actually be eliminated (you've heard of S.S.B. or single-sideband), but that was too big of a feat to be viable when tv standards were set. The compromise of vestigal sideband gave U.S. black and white tv slightly less than 4.5 MHz of bandwidth out of a 6 Mhz channel. The sound signal (F.M.) was placed 4.5 MHz up from the visual carrier frequency, so the usable video spectrum could extend quite that far. As with single-sideband, putting the same sideband transmission power as A.M. into a narrow channel reduces noise, so coverage is improved.
N.T.S.C. color stuffs additional information into the spectrum used by black and white. Because of the horizontal (line) scan rate being a samping rate of sorts, the video bands exist in clusters spaced that rate (15.750 Khz for B&W, changed to 15.734 Khz for color) occupying spectrum like the teeth of a comb. The added color information centers on a frequency 3.579545 MHz above the video carrier, a choice which causes the sidebands created by the color information to have a comb=like spectrum with the peaks falling right between those of the black and white. If you every had someone trying to sell you a tv that used comb filtering, maybe now you can almost understand why that was a good thing. It allowed recovering as much as possible of the detail present in both the black and white and color parts of the signal while minimizing interferrence effects between them. On old black and white tvs with pretty good signal bandwidth one could actually see a pattern in the parts of the picture where there was bright color content. It looked sort of like regularly spaced lighter/darker dots from left to right on each line. But the choice of frequencies/spacing was such that al
There was me thinking the French actually delivered 3 iconic car designs, the Traction Avant, the DS and the 2CV. But I was wrong as it was an Italian that took care of these. And don't think Bugatti, which produced stunningly beautiful cars, had anything French about the design either.
That leaves the French exclusively with absolute design mingers. (That is, if design is the correct verb for the process they use to envision cars.) In itself that's an achievement.
Praise to Flaminio Bertoni.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
And you know what? Most people will still not notice any difference, especially if they have to shell out for HDMI 50.0 monster cable or put up with quantum encryption DRM. Human eye doesn't have a terribly high resolution and frankly sharpness of graphics is behind so many factors that make a movie/TV show worth watching that it will never be a deciding factor. I don't see any difference in enjoyment of watching a dated James Bond movie vs the latest action flick, except the former is usually more witty. I do avoid any media that I can not watch or rip on my laptop or iphone.
I'll third the motion: Thanks.
It's seldom a shame that posts can't be modded past 5, but reading this makes me wish it were possible.
Kid-proof tablet..
You've mist the most obvious difference... it was monochrome.
as long as a disproportionate amount of sanitation workers and grave diggers are still alive, your theory might work.
HDCP? I'd be afraid to be sued in 1958 by the big studios in hollywood!
Wow, I didn't know we could post such long posts on Slashdot. Time to code a remote filesystem that works by storing data in Slashdot posts!
You just got troll'd!
...which is perfectly achievable with a Mac Mini.
Dunno if you can do it with MacOS software though. Even if you can, your types of inputs will be somewhat limited.
Anymore, who wants to futz with a "channel button" and all the baggage that comes with it? This is the 21st century.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Only 737 lines were image information. The rest was synchronization pulse and blanking for CRT flyback time.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_high-definition_television_system
Laboratory development in France had actually exceeded the 1000 line level, until the work got cut short when Hitler was pissed that those "Frenchies" were going to get better TV than the (then) German system of a mere 441 lines.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_systems_before_1940
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The first thing I thought after reading the article was, What a self-centered, money-hungry idiot! To amass an amazing collection like that and then sell it at auction is unconscionable. If he didn't want to donate it to a museum outright, he could at least put it on loan. I for one would pay good money for a chance to see even a portion of a collection like that. Now, once sold at auction, these priceless items will go into the hands of other private collectors, where they will not only remain outside of public view for the most part, they will now be scattered all over the world. That said, since this was the largest PRIVATE collection of early technology in the world, does anyone know of any good public collections, preferably in museums where they are visible to the public?
If they all didn't quit due to not technically needing to work anymore.