The TV Story Part 3

In our last episode where we last left off, if you prefer or last week on tech Stuff, we covered the contentious birth of the electronic television, talked about how a couple of different inventors and companies were laying claim to being the inventor of TV. And we also talked all the way up to the the invention of color TV and how CBS had tried to define color television, but our c A eventually was able to undermine that and create their own version, their own standard for color

t V that ended up becoming the standard. I'm gonna try and pack a lot in with this particular episode to talk about the significant developments that happened once color television started making an impact in the sixties and seventies, although I'm gonna have to backtrack some to cover some of these topics, because, as it turns out, history is

not a very simple timeline of dates. Right. If you want to explain how something works, sometimes you have to follow that trail down a few years before you backtrack and go back to an earlier point to go to the next logical section of your explanation. I wish time didn't work that way, because it would make organizing podcasts way easier. Now, for the most part, I've stayed away

from talking about actual programming on television. In other words, I haven't really talked about the types of stuff you'd watch on TV, just the technology of television itself. But television has really transformed our world in many ways, and it also cemented several notions when it comes to business practices, things like sponsorships and advertising. TV was able to establish some basic rules that ended up being applied to other industries,

including the online world. And we've seen a lot of growing pains because of that, because we've seen how the online world is very different from the broadcast TV world, and yet for a long time it was being treated as if it were the same thing from a marketing and advertising point of view. Uh And to this day, we're still struggling with that that decision. But let's get back to the technology section. So while our c A and CBS, we're duking out which company would define the

color TV standard. Other eggheads were working on different ways to transform the TV viewing experience. So as early as the nineteen thirties, A T and T began to experiment with coaxial cables to carry television transmissions to homes that couldn't receive over the air signals. And this was a problem not just in remote areas that were really far away from transmitters, but also in big cities where buildings could block signals. So I've covered cable TV and other

episodes of tech stuff. I'm not really going to dive into it here because it would just be repeating stuff I've talked about in previous episodes. But I'll just say that it was the rise of cable, particularly in the nineteen eighties, that transformed television again and gave audiences far more options than just a few local channels. It's also what gave rise to superstations that could cover an entire region,

an entire country. The United States is big. For a long time, everyone just had access to their local affiliate stations, so they didn't have access to things that were playing in other other regions, other markets. Here in Atlanta, you could pick up Chicago stations occasionally and you can see the Chicago version of the same stuff that you would get with in Atlanta based version. But after the the widespread use of cable, we started seeing these nationwide networks

that were the same across the entire United States. That was only made possible through cable TV. But I again, I covered that in a previous episode, so we're not really going to focus on that today. Now, in the late nineteen thirties, going back pretty far, Dr Fritz Fisher of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology dreamed up a way to project television images on a much larger screen.

So instead of just having a little twelve inch screen that you stare at, this would be a projector that could take TV signals and projected across a much wider viewing area. And in fact, the first working projection TV got its start in Europe in the nineteen thirties. Now, before I explain more, I should say that Dr Fisher

wasn't the only person working on this goal. Lots of people were trying to create projection televisions, including ones who had been working on something before Dr Fisher got started. Some even had a few working models, but most of them were producing very dim pictures, so you couldn't see them easily projected on a screen. So while I say Dr Fisher invented the projection television, that's really an oversimplification. Lots of people invented similar devices, and that seems to

be the case with technology as a whole. Whenever we say so and so invented something, there almost always needs to be an asterisk after that statement so that you can clarify other people were working on this too. It's just one incarnation ended up being superior to the others. Now, this particular invention's goal was to project an image large enough for a theater sized viewing space, and several movie studios were interested in this technology because it could provide

another source of revenue. If you didn't have a television, you could just hop down to your local movie house and check out television broadcasts there. But first someone had to make a gadget that could project a televised broadcast onto a screen. Now, Fritzie he unveiled a working prototype back in n teen forty four, and he received the US patent for his invention in ninet and he called

it the IDA four television system. Now IDA four is spelled E I D O P h O R, and technically, if you're being kind of generous, it means image bearer roughly speaking. And here's how it worked. I'm gonna go a little easy on this because the technical details get pretty complicated, so we're gonna kind of take a bird's eye view of this. First. Dr Fisher knew this system would need to be very bright to illuminate a theater screen, which was a problem. The other systems were running into

much much brighter than a normal television set. So for that reason, he decided to use a powerful arc light to provide the initial illumination, which was essentially a booster for the image, to make sure you got that bright enough so that when it projected on the screen it was visible. Then he had to find a way to modulate that light, in other words, to manipulate the light to actually make the moving images you would see on

the screen. And his solution was to create an electron gun system that we used a very thin layer of oil the heat called IDA four liquid. So this is not wildly different from cathode ray tube television screens. Remember a cathode ray tube generated a stream of electrons, and you would use that to paint the backside of a television screen which had a phosphorus coating on it. So as the electrons made contact with the phosphors, they would luminess,

they would light up. This is kind of a similar idea, except that you didn't have that phosphorus layer on a screen. Instead, the arc light would shine through a window and sometimes also a color wheel, a mechanical color wheel to add color to the image. That's the same style of color wheel that CBS was pioneering in their color television UH standard that they were pushing. Then that light, after it's gone through the color wheel, would go through what is

called a condenser lenn. Now, when light passes through a condenser lens, it aligns in parallel or collineated ways, so or collimated I should say not collineated collimated ways. You have these parallel rays of light after they pass through. So this is useful if you've got say a source of light that is diverging, it's spreading as it extends outward from the source. If it goes through a condenser lens,

then it concentrates into more of a beam. So you can think of those flashlights that have the really narrow beam that come out the end. Chances are they're using a condenser lens to create that beam. Uh. So it keeps the beam nice and tight, and those parallel rays of light would then encounter a mirrored bar system I mean, I mean physical bars. Think of like iron bars on a window, except instead of them being ironed, they're actually mirrors.

And it's angled in such a way that the light coming from the arc lamp gets reflected uh ninety degrees downward or to the lefter to the right, doesn't really matter, but generally we diagram this as being downward. That light would then hit a spherical mirror that would have a very thin coating of this oil on it this ida forore liquid on it, and pointed at this spherical mirror was the electron gun. Now, the electron gun would fire electrons just as a CRT tube would inside a television. Uh.

By the way, CRT tube, I'm being redundant. It's like a t M machine or pin number. But a CRT would fire electrons at the screen. In this case, the electron gun is firing electrons at that oil. The electron collisions would cause electrostatic charges to form on the surface of the oil, which would then make the oil create these wave like corrugations, and the high of the waves was proportional to the strength of the video signal or how bright it needed to be. This wave like action

on the oil is what actually modulated that light. So you had the light coming in, reflecting down off those mirrored bars, hitting this spherical mirror, and then being modulated by this undulating oil. And by undulating, I'm talking about atomic size changes in what was going on on the

surface layer of the this oil. That would then be reflected back up through the bars of this mirrored bar system up toward a projection lens, which was then directed at another mirror that would reflect the projection onto the theatrical screen. So some of the light goes through those bars,

continues upward and hits that projection lens. Now, but this is where that ninety degree turn is really important, because without that ninety degree turn, the arc light would just be shining lights straight through a projection lens, and all you would get is a blank screen, just just project just light projected on a screen. No image would be there. By having this mirror there that would let some light

go through. You could angle that light downward and have the projection lens above the mirrored bars, so only the reflected light is what ends up being put back onto the screen. The light directly from the arc lamp would not hit the screen, so you don't have to worry about the image bleeding out or just being a blank screen.

It's actually a really interesting system, and again it gets way more technical than what I'm describing right here, but without the use of visuals it becomes increasingly difficult to explain how this works, and light modulation, as it turns out, gets into some pretty heavy physics. And we've got to be completely honest here, I think I'd do a really lousy job at describing the whole process without a lot more work on my end to really get grips with

the science of it. So part of this is because it's difficult to explain without visuals, but the other part is just that when you get down to the physics of light, I have a basic understanding and would need to study a lot more to get a deeper understanding in order to express exactly how this machine worked in a more meaningful way. So please cut me some slack. I'm not an optic scientist. The point is this contraption, which weighed nearly two thousand pounds, allowed a projectionist to

send a televised signal to a large movie screen. And the reason it weighed so much was because it required a lot of power. So you had a lot of power elements inside this thing. Uh. The electron gun and the IDA four liquid also had to be kept inside a vacuum, so you needed to have vacuum pumps to make sure that you maintain that vacuum inside the chamber with the IDA four liquid, otherwise you wouldn't get the

results that you needed. Also, temperature changes could affect the performance of the oil itself, so you had try and keep the temperature of the whole device fairly constant, which meant that you had to include fans to blast out extras extra excess heat. So there are a lot of different components that went together to make up this thing,

which meant that it was enormous and heavy as a result. Uh. By nineteen fifty two, television had found its way to the Great White North a k a. Canada, and uh, here's a shout out to all my viewers in Canada. You guys are awesome. You guys might have been a little late to the TV game, but you've also produced some of the greatest writers and television performers in history from SCTV, two Kids in the Hall and hundreds more. But then you also gave a Seline Dion, So don't

get full of yourselves. You need to think about what you did. In nineteen fifty six, we get another interesting invention, one of my favorites, Zenith revealed the Zenith Space Command. So Zenith Space Command, uh, in case you're curious, was not a computer game. It was a remote control. It was the remote control, the first wireless remote control that

was successful in the consumer market place. It was not the very first wireless remote control, but was the first one to really be viable enough to make it to market. And it was invented by a guy named Robert Adler. And I probably should do a full episode on Robert Adler. He was born in Austria, but he left Austria during the rise of the Nazi Party in the nineteen thirties and he moved around Europe a bit, went to the UK, and eventually immigrated to the United States. Then he took

a job at Zenith Electronics in the R and D division. UH. Now, before Adler's invention, remote controls hadn't seen much success beyond the laboratory. Early versions were actually tethered. In other words, they had a cable that would connect back to the TV, so really the remote control was was tied to the television. You couldn't go anywhere with it. Uh It limited their usefulness,

so they never saw widespread adoption. And an earlier wireless system used visible light and light sensing photo cells on the television itself, so it's almost like a little flashlight and if you pressed a button, it would flash a certain sequence to send a command to the television, which would then detect it through photo cells. But there's a problem there. It was depending upon visible light, and it turns out we use a lot of different sources of visible light because we do not see so well in

the dark. So if your television set was exposed to other sources of visible light, like the sun, it could mistakenly interpret those light sources as being commands and the next thing you know, you can't hear anything because the sun keeps lowering the volume on your television set, so that was a bit of a problem. Adler had a different solution um, and it was different from the ones

that we have today. Today's remote controls mostly rely on some other four of electromagnetic radiation, whether it's infrared or some form of WiFi radio signal. That's what most modern remote controls rely upon today. But back in the day, it was all about ultrasonic frequencies. Old television remotes used sound to control TVs, and inside these remotes were actual

small metal bars, typically made out of aluminum. So you had physical little metal bars inside this remote control box, and if you pressed the button, it would cause a little lever to make those bars vibrate, and that vibration would give off an ultrasonic frequency, and a receiver on the television would quote unquote here this frequency and then transfer that into some form of control. So it might be volume up or volume down, it might turn the TV off or on, it might change a channel. Uh,

you know, your basic remote control functions. And these sounds are ultrasonic, so they're beyond the range of Hugh been hearing. Remember human hearing goes from about twenty hurts to twenty killer hurts. Uh. Typically that's that's average. Your results may vary depending upon the human of choice. My hearing is probably I'm at an age where it's probably not nearly as high as twenty. Killer hurts for me because as you get older, you start to lose the ability to

detect those higher frequencies. This is why you would hear stories about certain convenience stores employing sound systems that could play a pitch that was above what the typical adult could hear, but within the hearing of say, gnarly teenagers who are always clogging up the store. You just crank up this irritating pitch that only the teenagers can hear, and next thing you know, there aren't bothering you anymore. It's a brilliant technology. In my mind, it saves me

from yelling at kids to get off my lawn. But going back to the TV, this was supposed to be at signals that not even teenagers can hear, even if you ask them. Now, because the remote control and receiver we're using these ultrasonic frequencies, you could cause your old television to freak out with stuff like loose change or slinky. Really, any metal or metallic device that could vibrate at a at a frequency that would generate ultrasonic sound. You could

end up affecting a television this way. So this explains how back when I would sit down to watch Saturday morning cartoons, which, by the way, we're a thing that used to happen. Now you don't really see them anymore, but back in the day, that's when you would watch cartoons Saturday mornings. You can get up seven or eight

am and just start watching on various television stations. Anyway, when I would sit there and watch and then just idly fidget with a slinky, I could magically make my TV do stuff like turn the volume down over and over again until I had to track down the actual remote control and turn the volume back up because I couldn't do I couldn't control the TV. I could make it do things, but I couldn't make it do what

I wanted it to. It just would do whatever the ultrasonic frequencies were telling the television to do, and I couldn't have that kind of fine control over my slinky manipulation skills to make it do what I wanted it to do. But still kind of cool. Uh. The later systems that used infrared and WiFi won't respond to ultrasonic frequencies. But I maintained it's still fun to tell kids about how a slinky used to be able to control a television and then don't tell them that it doesn't work anymore,

because they could provide hours of entertainment for all involved. Anyway, I just like tricking kids. I guess that seems like a good segue. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor, So let's skip ahead to nineteen sixty two. That's when broadcasting companies from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France collaborate on the design of the world's first

active communication satellite called tell Star one. Companies like Bell Labs and A T and T took part in this, as did NASA and the British Post Office and the French Post as well. This satellite would allow a broadcast station in Europe to send signals over to the United States and vice versa. It also allowed for satellite uplink on phone calls and faxes, so you could have transatlantic

communication via satellite. You didn't have to worry about laying a cable down between Europe and the United States, for example, so very useful now. The satellite entered low Earth orbit on July tenth, two and it used for teen whole lots of power. Chances are your laptop uses more than that, but fourteen wats of power for this little satellite, and it generated electricity using thousands of solar panels on its

outer hull. And it was spherically shaped, So if you look at a picture of the tell Star one and you don't have anything next to it to give you any sense of scale, you might think it's the product of a marriage between a disco ball and the Death Star, which I maintain would be an awesome technology. But then again, I also happened to own the Star Wars and Other

Galactic Funk vinyl album by Miko. Anyone out there who knows what I'm saying man rock On as an awesome, awesome, cheesy album, and I really do own it on vinyl. The tell Star one satellite allowed for near instantaneous transmission across the Atlantic with very little delay. It was possible to watch real time live TV broadcast from across the and but you could only do it for about twenty

minutes because the satellite was in low Earth orbit. That's a problem because at low eth orbit it is actually circling the Earth multiple times every day. It took about two and a half hours for it to orbit the planet, which meant that you had about twenty minutes of time where the satellite was ideally positioned to transmit signals from

Europe to the United States or vice versa. Later on we would launch communication satellites much much further out from Earth had very high orbits into what is called geosynchronous orbits, and a geosynchronous orbit allows the satellite to move in a pattern over the same general area above the Earth, so as the Earth turns, the satellites orbiting at the same speed as the rotation of the Earth same relative speed, not the exact same speed, because obviously you have to

move faster the further out you are, but it would be able to maintain a general position above a certain region of the Earth, and it tends to move in a pattern, often a figure eight style pattern. There is a subset of geosynchronous orbit called geo stationary orbit, in which a satellite appears to be directly above a single point on Earth along the equator. You have to be along the equator in order for this to work. But that is a subset of geosynchronous. So geosynchronous and geo

stationary are not exactly the same. Geo stationary as a subset of geosynchronous orbits. Just something for you to think of next time you're doing pub trivia and this kind of stuff pops up. I don't know about your pub trivia, but it pops up all the time for mine. By nineteen sixty four, broadcast networks in the United States began to transmit color television programming on a regular basis. You remember we talked about color TV in the last episode.

It would still be a few years before color television sales outpaced black and white TVs. Uh, really, you're talking about nineteen seventy And by nineteen seventy two you finally got to a point where color televisions made up about

fifty of all TVs in the United States. And in nineteen sixty nine, the world watched as footage from the moon landing reached TVs across the globe, and the astronauts on that moon landing had a special camera, and the camera had its own mechanical color wheel inside of it, which was the same thing I talked about way back in the first episode with mechanical televisions, I also mentioned

them in electronic TVs. The mechanical color wheel in the camera cut down on the need for expensive and bulky components, and it also meant the astronauts didn't have to send as much data at a single time down to Earth within a transmission, so it cut down on the bandwidth necessary to send images back down to Earth. Synchronized color wheels on the planet, we're able to reinsert color into images before transmitting them to televisions, and I think it's

pretty cool. The technology that dates all the way back to the mechanical TVs of the past found its way to the Moon. It's pretty nifty. Also, in the nineteen sixties, scientists developed three technologies that would eventually displace CRT televisions. That would be light emitting diodes or l e d S, liquid crystal displays or l c d S, and plasma display panels or p DPS. L c D televisions wouldn't take off for a few years, but they would come

first out of those three. It would take a couple of decades for plasma to become a viable technology for television's although they started being used for smaller displays earlier,

and LED televisions are even more relatively recent. Although the development of the l E ED dates back to the nineteen sixties, we didn't see LED televisions until fairly recent uh, But a lot of people were experimenting with these all the way through the nineteen seventies, trying to get the next technology for CRT S or to replace c r T S. I should say, now, let's start with nineteen sixty four in the invention of the plasma display panel.

So yeah, plasma di lays date back to nineteen sixty four. It was co invented by Donald Bitzer, H Gene Slotto, and Robert Wilson. Now they were working on developing a computer display, not really a television, but the basic principle is the same. The display consists of two panes of glass that are pretty close together, but there's enough space in between them to insert and inert mixture of gases,

which are typically neon and xenon. Those gases can turn into a plasma, which is an electrically conductive gas has some free electrons which allow it to conduct electricity. This is, by the way, the most plentiful type of matter in the universe. It's the stuff that stars are made out of. Although they are much hotter than a plasma TV, You're not gonna melt your house down with a at least

a properly functioning plasma TV. The plasma, once it's carrying electricity, then excites phosphors, very similar to the way a cr T television would use electrons to excite phosphors. And when you do that, you increase the energy levels in the electrons in those phosphor out atoms, and then they immediately come back down. And when they come back down their energy levels they have to release that excess energy in the form of light, So the phosphers end up glowing.

They give off light, So the plasma takes that place of the electron beam. And the first plasma display panel could only display a single color. Uh they made some in orange, green, and yellow. Those were your basic colors that you would get for your computer monitors back in the day. Now, the plasma display didn't take off in the market or replace the CRT right away, largely due to economics. It had nothing to do with the science or the technology itself. It had to do with how

expensive it was to produce versus c RT technology. Semiconductor memory was plummeting in price. This was something Gordon More predicted in his obser vation that has since been called Moore's law. Moore's law is not really about advancing technology, so that's twice as powerful each year, or each eighteen months or twenty four months, or however you wanted to find the time period. It's really about how much less expensive it is to manufacture those components and make it

UH viable as a marketplace product. So every time that advances, it gives companies the incentive to develop even more powerful semiconductors. That also means the price starts to come down, and that's what was happening at this time. So CRT technology became super cheap. So there was really no incentive to pursue plasma display technology at that time, not for televisions anyway.

So it was only that point where the PDPs performance were so above and beyond what CRT s could do that it started to counterbalance this this UH disparity in price, and once that happened, then we started seeing plasma displays adopted more widely. It also allowed for much slimmer form factors than your CRT sets. I mean a CRT is essentially a vacuum tube. It's a vacuum tube that generates a stream of electrons, which means you need to have space in your television set to hold an electron tube.

Plasma displays don't need that. They have these two panes of glass and then this gas that's in between them, and then you just have to electrically excite the gas the proper way to make the phosphors glow, so they could be much much thinner than CRT screens. But again, that wasn't really a concern until much later than the nineteen sixties, so it would be a long time before we would see the rise of the flat screen television.

But PDPs had an advantage over the other early CRT replacement technology of l c d s. That was the other big one. Plasma displays are not constantly back lit, but l c d s are. Will get more into that in just a second. That means you could get a much better contrast ratio between the brightest and darkest colors on display, so you can get those what they

call true blacks on a on a plasma display. Because there's no light coming from behind shining through a layer, whereas l c D s did have that light constantly there as long as the television set was on at any rate. Also, plasma displays had better viewing angles than earlier l c D displays dead and better response time and better color representation than early l c D s, So eventually l c D would eliminate those advantages. They

would catch up to plasma displays. But this is the reason why home theater enthusiasts back in the day, and by back in the day, I really mean the ninety nineties would swear by plasma over l c D technology because of this color representation, contrast ratio, better viewing angles, all that kind of stuff. Eventually, LED tech would push both of those aside. But more on that in a second. So let's talk about l c D s. That stands for liquid crystal displays, and liquid crystals are sort of

a weird molecule. They kind of act like a solid and they kind of act like a liquid. So solids, I'm sure you recall, you guys, remember your elementary science. They have all their atoms locked together, either in a crystalline structure or not. But they are locked so that

they can't move around right, they're stuck in place. Otherwise they wouldn't be, you know, solid, But liquids have molecules that hang together, so the molecules don't break apart, but they can't move around more freely than in a solid, and they can change their orientation with relation to each other, uh, without any problems. So liquid crystals are sort of a hybrid between these two, and the l c D s

and television are affected by electric current. In their natural state, these crystals have a twisted formation because of the way are attached at either end inside a television display. More on that in a second. But when you apply a current to them, they untwist, and it's through this twisting and untwisting that you're able to manipulate light and have it go through to a screen and create the moving

images you would see on an l c D television screen. Uh. That's the simple explanation, but let's dive into it a little bit further. So we're gonna explain this in one of my favorite ways to describe technology as a sandwich, because lunch was a long time ago, y'all, So our bottom bun in this sandwich is a light source, uh, such as a fluorescent tube. That's your typical light source in your early L C D s now. On top of that first layer, that bottom bun, we have a

tasty piece of polarizing film. So polarizing film can align light, polarize it in a certain way. Next, on top of that we put a glass filter which is aligned the same way as the polar rising film. Then we put a negative electrode on top of that glass filter. That's the electrode that says mean things about other electrodes. Not sorry, that's just in my notes. This is actually the electrode that puts out electrons. It generates electrons, sends those through.

It's the where the electrons come from. Now, on top of the negative filter are are liquid crystals that we arrange in a layer on that. On the other side of the liquid crystals comes a positive electrode. This is where the electrons quote unquote want to go to. Remember, electrons are negative themselves and like repels like, so they want to get away from the negative side and go

toward the positive side. Uh. So, on top of the positive electrode is another glass filter, and on top of that is another sheet of polarizing film, and that is in a orientation that is ninety degrees off from the first polarizing filter. So in other words, it's that a right angle to the first layer. Then you've got the glass cover or screen, and that acts as the top bun.

So here's what's going on. Light comes from the fluorescent tube, it hits that first filter I talked about, which then polarizes the light that puts the light in a certain alignment. Let's say that light, now realigned, goes through the series of liquid crystals which are manipulated by electric fields to twist or untwist in certain ways. That actually changes the lights plane of vibration as it's guided through this this layer of liquid crystals until it passes through and it

hits that second polarized filter. Now, any light that matches the polarization of that second filter can pass through. Any light that doesn't match that polarization is stopped. So you can only pass through if you're aligned with that same polarization. And think of it like a bunch of vertical slits that are next to each other. And if you have a ray of light that isn't vertically oriented, it cannot

fit through that vertical slit. Or if you prefer think of round pegs and square holes, you can't get the round peg through the square hole because the shape doesn't fit correctly. It's the same general concept we're talking with polarization. So some of the light is angled the proper way and it passes through, and that's the light you see on the screen. Other light gets blocked by this second polarization filter and doesn't make it to the screen. Uh,

and that is your basic l c D television screen. Now, in a color display, which is typically what we see with l c D television's, each pixel has three cells. These are sometimes called sub pixels, and these are red, green, and blue, and the combination of these make up all

the possible colors. We talked a little bit about color television in our last episode, so the same principle applies here, except we're talking about light being passed through l c D s as opposed to an electron gun painting phosphors.

Each subpixel can be independently controlled to make lots of different colors when you combine these over the course of multiple scans within a second, and some companies enhance this with other additional subpixels, like sharp they have a yellow subpixel, and they claim that this leads to more accurate color representation.

But this method also means that you always have a light source behind all those liquid crystals and polarization filters, and while it can prevent light from coming through, there's still usually a distinct glow coming from the screen because the forests and lights are just lit behind the whole time. Does that means? Sel c D screens, particularly the older ones, had trouble displaying darker colors without light bleeding through the screen.

So if you had a perfectly ark room and you were watching a movie on an old l c D television and the screen goes to black, you would actually see almost like a charcoal gray screen. You would still be able to pick the screen out from the rest of the room because it's not able to present a

true black because you always have that backlight on. Uh. But then again, you know, while while plasma screens could present a true black, they also had another problem called burning, which is when you have an image that's on display for too long on a screen and it burns into the screen itself. So, for example, if you had a just a waiting screen showing like maybe it was a paused movie or television show or something along those lines, and it was on the plasma display for a really

long time. This happened a lot with demo displays that would show a logo for a really long time that would burn into the screen, so you could always see a ghostly image of that on on older alasthma displays. Just like l c D technology eventually evolved to the point where the differences between l c D and plasma became less noticeable. Plasma technology also advanced to a point where burning became less of a problem, but those early

screens definitely suffered from that problem. Now LED televisions might as well fell finish the trifecta here. LED televisions use light emitting diodes as the light source instead of fluorescent tubes, but they still use liquid crystals a layer of liquid crystals to determine which light gets through to those polarization filters.

So really you could think of l e D television's as a subset of l c D t vs. But with l e D s there's much better power efficiency uh than those fluorescent based sets because l E D s are are just extremely efficient. Also, you could allow

televisions to become even more thin than before. L e D s take up very little space, and because you're using an array of l e d s instead of a couple of fluorescent lights, you have way more control over which l e d s are lit up at which time, so you could produce better contrast ratio with an LED television set than with a traditional l c D set. And I've done a lot of episodes about l e d s in the past, so I'm not going to divide into it more here except to say

they're pretty boss. Then there's no lead sets, but I'm not really going to go into that at all because it would require a full episode on its own. But those are organic light emitting diodes. That's what allows you the truly super thin screens. And they can also be flexible. You can get those curved screens, you can get screens that can change shape. You might remember there were a couple of television sets that were promoted as being able

to change from flat to curved. I think most companies have abandoned that now because there just wasn't widespread adoption. It was almost as a curiosity but oh lad technology allows that to happen. Now, in the early nineties seventies, now that we've described the technologies that would eventually supplant CRT s, we started seeing the first of giant screen televisions, and the earliest were CRT televisions that were projection TVs.

That meant that they used cathode ray tubes just like traditional televisions did, or at least they also used CRT s. It was actually a little different from the way traditional TVs used them. It also made the sets really heavy and they gave off a lot of heat. If you've ever used an old front or rear projection television that use CRT s, you know how big and clunky and bulky and hot they got. They also worked a little bit differently, as I said, from standard CRT s. But

the the early early models were front projection televisions. That meant that you had a component that actually sat in front of the TV and projected onto the screen, sort of like a movie projector does to a movie screen, except, of course, we're talking about television images here, not not a light shining through moving film. Now, the projectors in front of the television consisted of three light guns. So each of these light guns had a CRT inside them.

There was one that was red, one that was blue, and one that was green. Big surprise there right the colors that we would use to create all the other colors that could be represented on a television. So all three of those colors would combine. The series of images would combine in different intensities to create the moving images you would see in front of you as you're watching this television. Uh, and the intensity of the light through each light gun is what would determine the final color

as it was painting this picture. So the projection screen was was painted and pretty much the same way the CRT TV sets painted the back of the screen with electrons. These televisions were generally lower resolution than what you would get with a typical CRT screen, So while you could get a bigger television at it wasn't at the level of quality that you would expect with an old CRT

TV set. And then there were rear projection CRT t vs where you would have all those components, but they would be inside the television itself and projecting on the back of the TV TV screen, but still a projection it wasn't painting phosphors the way a CRT TV set would. These were huge. I should know. I had one once upon a time. I bought one just as CRT rear projection televisions were going off the market, so it was super cheap. It's also huge, took up an enormous space

in my living room, and now it's in storage. True story, all right, so let's skip ahead of it. Television continued to proliferate around the world, with color television's eventually becoming

the standard and replacing black and white TVs. Meanwhile, over in Japan, researchers were hard at work developing the next generation of television technologies, and a team of scientists at NHK we're able to demonstrate an h d TV format with one thousand onive lines of resolution, so HDTV stands for high definition TV, and those lines of resolution um were more. It was a huge amount, Like five twenty

five was the standard here in the United States. It's different than other parts of the world, but here in the US you had five hundred twenty five full lines of resolutions. So one thousand, one and twenty five was a big jump up. And remember uh, more lines of resolution means sharper pictures. This happened all the way back in nineteen eight one, So the first h d TV standard proposed came in eighty one, which blows my mind because it wasn't until the mid nineties that I really

started seeing HDTV take off. Two years later three this team from NHK actually demonstrated this technology at a conference in Montrue, Switzerland. Uh and I hear they were rewarded with many, many chocolates. It's good work for them. However, in nineteen six they met with resistance from agencies in Europe and the United States. The agency's declined to acquiesce to Japan's request that this version of HDTV become the global standard. So Japan went ahead and started broadcasting in

HDTV in Japan. Uh and they did that despite the fact that everyone else said, no, that's not going to be the standards. So they started doing that in nine they actually became the first country to regularly broadcast in HDTV. However, the rest of the world would resist adopting their standard and instead try to develop their own, so you had

various components all doing this at the same time. The United States had the FCC creating a special committee to determine what the new digital standard in the United States should be, just the digital standard, not even the HDTV standard.

Over in Europe you had companies introduced the D two Multiplexed Analog Components standard to lay the groundwork for analog HDTV over on the continent, in a multinational committee of engineers decided that the Moving Pictures Experts Group Format IMPEG two would be the global standard for broadcasting digital television pictures. But they did not standardize a method of encoding the sound or a method for actual broadcast of that standard.

So they said, this is going to be the standard to carry the information, but they didn't standardize the way to deliver it or how to encode sound with it, which meant every country developed its own standard which are incompatible with other countries, thus creating all these compatibility issues between different regions. That was fun. Now I've got a lot more to talk about in this third section about the history of televisions, but wore I jump into that.

Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Let's pick up in that's when direct TV launched. I guess literally anyway, I should do a full episode just about satellite television, because I don't think I have. I've covered cable television pretty extensively in past episodes, but I don't

think I've covered satellite TV that much. I might have talked about a little bit back when Chris Palette was my co host, because he used to work tangentially anyway with a satellite television company, and he would always recuse himself at the beginning of those discussions. So maybe I will do a full episode about satellite television sometime in

the future. In the FCC would approve a new standard called Advanced TV in the United States that included both multi channel standard digital television also known as s DTV, as well as high definition television. By more than twenty stations in the US across the top ten markets in the country began to broadcast in digital formats rather than

an analog. Now more current televisions are equipped for this, but older sets would actually need a converter in order to accept a digital signal and then converted into an

analog signal that the television could then display. By the mid two thousand's, we reached the time in the US when all broadcasts were to switch to digital only that actually ended up getting delayed to the late two thousand's, UM that first decade, in the late two thousand's, I should say, because we're still pretty early on People from the Future. This episode was recorded in seventeen, so I don't mean like two thousand, nine hundred, So coolier jets. Also,

thanks for tuning in. But anyway, this, this conversion from digital or from analog to digital, I should say, caused some confusion in the marketplace, more than a little confusion, partly because the messaging was muddled. It was hard to

understand what was actually being communicated. Consumers were not really sure if their televisions would continue to work after the switchover date, and I suspect a lot of people bought unnecessary converters from analog or digital to analog, thinking, oh, I guess I need this so that my TV can display it, not knowing that their television was already accepting digital signals because all the recent television sets that have been sold over the past decade really were equipped for

digital broadcasts, not for analog, but not everyone knew that UM, and so a lot of people ended up thinking they needed a converter if they didn't really and they didn't really need one. So the the problem was that anyone who was using an analog television set would be left behind because their television would no longer be able to take over the air broadcast. And this only affected over the air as well. If you were cable you were fine,

your cable box was doing everything for you. Um, but if you were doing over the air, like you were using an antenna to get your programming, then you needed to have an adapter if you had an old analog television set. But this, all of this information was communicated really haphazard and ineffective way. Uh. The cynical among us might say, well, that's the government for you, but really it just was a It was a really chaotic and

confusing time for a lot of consumers. One of the earliest episodes of tech Stuff I ever recorded was about this switch. I recorded it with my original co host, Chris Palette, and if you want to listen to that now completely irrelevant episode, it is called do I really need a digital converter box for my TV? I published

on July four, two thousand eight, Bastille Day. The answer, by the way, to that question is no, you do not need a digital converter for your TV, unless you've been wondering since two thousand eight why you're perfectly serviceable analog television is no longer picking up more than mindy reruns, in which case the answer it might be, yeah, you do need a digital converter for your TV, and you have needed it for like a decade, But the better

answer is probably just buy a new television anyway. Since that time, we've seen the emergence of ultra high definition television. This includes four K and eight K televisions, which up the anti on resolution and honestly, at least in my opinion, this is my opinion, unless your television is truly gargangeline, you really don't need to worry about four K and eight K television too much. If you sit close to

a really big TV, you'll notice the difference. But if you're at the proper distance, which most of us are sitting too close to our television's already. But if you're at what is considered the proper viewing distance and your television isn't at seventy inches or larger, I doubt you'll really be able to see a huge distinction between HD at ultra HD. Now some of you might, but my

old eyes have trouble telling the difference. If you put an ultra HD set and an HD set of comparable size at the proper viewing distance away from me, I bet you it would be really hard for me to tell the difference, assuming that they both were calibrated to perform at peak performance. Because there are ways of making TVs look better or worse, people in electronics stores know

this trick. You can. You can calibrate one television to look really good on the display floor and another one to look less good because the really good one costs more, and you can push people to buy the more expensive television set. But if you truly calibrate both of them properly, you might see less of a difference. That's not to say that all TVs are created equal. They aren't, but

sometimes these differences are exaggerated in order to make a sale. Also, you've got to remember that anything that was calibrated for the show floor is probably lousy in your living room. You're gonna have to have it recalibrated so that you get the effect you what in your home theater based upon the light levels and other elements in your home.

But that's a whole episode all by itself. Anyways, you might suspect these ultra high definition televisions cram way more pixels onto the screen than either HD or certainly more than standard definition television sets. And that's what resolution is really, It's the number of pixels that you can fit within the frame of a picture. More pixels generally means you

can represent finer details and make it less blocky. So you might remember in a previous episode in the series, I gave an analogy in which I talked about trying to make a picture of the Eiffel Tower using solid colored bricks. So the small are and more numerous the blocks I'm given, the more accurately I can represent that image.

And that's the case with televisions. As pixels get smaller and more numerous, the images they produce can have details so fine that the human I really can't detect it unless you're right up on that son of a gun, and I mean inches away. Heck, when I first saw eight K television sets at c e S, the representatives there would actually hand out magnifying glasses so that you could get just inches away from the screen, hold up the magnifying glass and see the pixels, and that was

the only way you could even pick them out. And at that point you might think, well, we've kind of reached a level where it's indiscernible from the human eye to tell the difference between this layer of resolution and this layer of resolution again without the added benefits of ideal calibration. Now, the NHK guys over in Japan, the ones who were working on that HDTV standard back in Night one were the ones who helped define the four K and eight K standards. Now they managed to win out.

In this case, HDTV got kind of tossed the side, but four K and eight K one the day. But right now there's a scarcity of content at those resolutions. We're starting to see that change over time. You're starting to see some set top boxes that can generate and ultra high definition stream of data. There's some online sources that are offering this ultra high definition level of resolution. Things like YouTube and Netflix are offering that as well

as other streaming services. You're starting to see some of the other companies kind of dip their toe in this, but it's still very early days for ultra high definition. So you could buy one of these sets and not really see the benefit from it unless you also subscribe to one of these services where you're getting the actual four K or eight K content. Otherwise you're just watching high definition or even standard definition content on an ultra

high definition screen. Uh. And that's you know, that's that's not great. It's not like it's magically a whole lot better than watching it on a native standard definition or high definition screen. Japan is actually trying over the air broadcasts in uh D. I will likely see other countries follow suit. Ah. Now, one last thing I want to cover before I wrap up is something called high dynamic

range or HDR. And this is something that started popping up at consumer electronics shows over the last few years me five or six years. Really, Uh, this technology isn't so much about the resolution of images, which is what four K and a K are all about. It's more about accurately representing the levels of light and color on

television screens. So, in other words, a TV with HDR should start producing images that look so lifelike that seems as if you're looking through a window rather than looking

at a television screen. Now there's a bit of confusion about the types of HDR, because there's photo HDR, which at a very high level essentially is talking about taking a series of images at a different level of exposure and then kind of using an algorithm to combine those into an ideal image to present a photograph that's supposed to be better than any of the components that went together to create that photograph. Some people hate that effect.

That's not the same thing as television HDR. That's just for photographs. T V HDR uses a slightly different approach. The secrets TV HDR all has to do with how much light is being shown on the screen, or at least that's mostly what it has to do with as

far as television technology goes. A TV with hd R should be able to produce more light in one part of an image than in other parts, even pixel by pixel, so it can create very subtle gradations of light and shade, which is what makes images appear more lifelike and can

also aid in color representation. Although there are related technologies to HDR that help with that, and this is what makes his lifelike images, and we see the same representations of light that we would see out in the real world, so it's not just it's not just a replication, but a true representation of what was captured on the production side. However, it does not happen all on its own. To display an image so that it looks real enough to reach

out and touch, you have to actually produce it in HDR. So, in other words, using a regular camera to capture images and send it to an HDR television, is it magically going to create those incredibly vibrant, subtle gradations, right? You have to have the HDR technology built into the post production process to create the colors in the first place for HDR to rep locate, So there's an extra step,

in other words, in the production process. So you probably know that if you watch a standard definition program on an HD TV, you're not magically watching high definition. You're watching standard definition that's typically upscaled two approximate high definition television. Upscaling essentially means that you are adding in extra pixels,

like neighboring pixels. Think of think of standard definition and has a certain number of pixels, and let's argue for the you know, just for the sake of simplicity, that HD is twice as many pixels. So every odd pixel in HD would correspond to a single pixel and an s D, So you have pixels one and three an HD which would represent pixels one and two in standard definition. So what does the HD pixel to show? Well, upscaling

algorithms take a guess. They say, well, based upon what these two colors are, we would think that the pixel in between should be this color. So it it generates a pixel that was not created in the initial process of capturing that standard definition content. It's inventing information based on a best guess, and the algorithms are completely what generate those guesses, and they're generally pretty good. But upscaled standard definition doesn't look as good as true high definition.

Same thing with high dynamic range. You need to have that HDR source to enjoy the benefit of an HDR television set. Without that source, it's just a technology that really can't kick into gear. So you have to depend upon the creators to generate the content, whether it's with a Blu ray or whether it's through broadcast technology. Uh. Otherwise you just have this cool tech that you really

can't do anything with. Probably an easier analogy to imagine is three D Television's if you're watching something that wasn't shot in three D. It doesn't matter if you have a three D television unless it's doing that really awful simulated three D, which I do not recommend. But if it's taking just a regular image, then three D T three D is just a feature that isn't used on that content stream. So it does require that post production work. But assuming that you get that, then you get this

incredible picture quality. And I've seen sets that have really good hd R on them and it is gorgeous, Like the color representation is breathtaking. It to me, it is more effective than these dramatic improvements and resolution because, like I said, once you get to a certain level, unless you have a ludicrously enormous TV, and I'm talking like a hundred inch television or bigger, then you don't really notice the difference in the jump in resolution. Just because

our our eyes aren't that advanced. We can't tell the difference unless we're really close to the screen, in which case you can't really see everything anyway, because your fill of view is completely covered by part of the screen you're looking at. Uh HDR to me makes more of a difference. One person has said, it's not about more pixels. It's about better pixels, which is a rough way of of equating HDR versus high ultra high resolution. I'm being said, I'm sure that a lot of people can tell the

difference between high definition and ultra high definition. I'm not really one of those people. I can tell a little bit of a difference, but not enough. It's not as dramatic as the change from standard definition to high definition. Not for me anyway. Frame rates are another thing. I could talk about frame rates and how television manufacturers have created super fast refresh rates for their TVs, where the screen is refreshing many more times per second than your

standard definition television's were. This works great for stuff that's moving really fast on your screen, typically stuff like sports. If you're watching sports on television and you have a really fast frame rate, it may it reduces blur, so you can see all the action very clearly, and it's really impressive. If you're watching anything else, it's really disorienting. That's where you start getting that that what people call the soap opera effect, where everything starts looking like it

was shot on a soap opera set. Um. Yeah, Dylan's giving the old thumbs down. Uh, This is where I could go into a full rant about the Hobbit films, and I have done it on other podcasts. Anyone who's listened to those other podcasts knows what I'm talking about. Don't get me started. I don't like high frame rates or high refresh rates for that matter, for content that's not sports related anyway, and I'm not a big sports fan. I appreciate it, I just don't watch a lot of

it anyway. If I wanted to dive into ultra high definition frame rates or refresh rates or HDR to any real extent, it would require a full episode dedicated to just that topic. And I really don't want to extend this series further at this time, so I'll probably revisit these topics further down the road. Let's get like a couple of dozen episodes of other stuff before I tackled TVs again. But I did have fun tracing the history of the evolution of televisions, particularly the early days, because

it was such a dramatic story. Uh, for now, I'm gonna wrap up this series, and even now I had to gloss over a ton of stuff. I apologize for that, but honestly, I don't want to sit here and record for four hours, and Dylan definitely he doesn't want that, so we're gonna leave it for now. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, please let me know. You can get in touch with me by sending an email to the address text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a

line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those locations is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com