Analog television is the original television technology that uses analog signals to transmit video and audio. In an analog television broadcast, the brightness, colors and sound are represented by amplitude, phase and frequency of an analog signal.
The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC) in 1941. In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M.
Color television or colour television is a television transmission technology that includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white television technology, which displays the image in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world upgraded from black-and-white to color transmission between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television standards was an important part of the history and technology of television.
Kinescope, shortened to kine, also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s for the preservation, re-broadcasting and sale of television programmes before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes. Kinescopes were the only practical way to preserve live television broadcasts prior to videotape.
A test card, also known as a test pattern or start-up/closedown test, is a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active but no program is being broadcast.
A professional video camera is a high-end device for creating electronic moving images. Originally developed for use in television studios or with outside broadcast trucks, they are now also used for music videos, direct-to-video movies, corporate and educational videos, wedding videos, among other uses. Since the 2000s, most professional video cameras are digital professional video cameras.
Video camera tubes were devices based on the cathode ray tube that were used in television cameras to capture television images, prior to the introduction of charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors in the 1980s. Several different types of tubes were in use from the early 1930s, and as late as the 1990s.
The Indian-head test pattern is a test card created by RCA of Harrison, New Jersey, which became the standard image of the RCA TK-1 monoscope. It features a drawing of a Native American wearing a headdress and numerous graphic elements designed to test different aspects of broadcast display. The card was introduced in 1939 and over the course of the black-and-white television broadcasting era was widely adopted by television stations across North America.
Mechanical television or mechanical scan television is an obsolete television system that relies on a mechanical scanning device, such as a rotating disk with holes in it or a rotating mirror drum, to scan the scene and generate the video signal, and a similar mechanical device at the receiver to display the picture. This contrasts with vacuum tube electronic television technology, using electron beam scanning methods, for example in cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions. Subsequently, modern solid-state liquid-crystal displays (LCD) are now used to create and display television pictures.
The 405-line monochrome analogue television broadcasting system was the first fully electronic television system to be used in regular broadcasting. The number of television lines influences the image resolution, or quality of the picture.
The concept of television was the work of many individuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first practical transmissions of moving images over a radio system used mechanical rotating perforated disks to scan a scene into a time-varying signal that could be reconstructed at a receiver back into an approximation of the original image. Development of television was interrupted by the Second World War. After the end of the war, all-electronic methods of scanning and displaying images became standard. Several different standards for addition of color to transmitted images were developed with different regions using technically incompatible signal standards. Television broadcasting expanded rapidly after World War II, becoming an important mass medium for advertising, propaganda, and entertainment.
The Apollo program used several television cameras in its space missions in the late 1960s and 1970s; some of these Apollo TV cameras were also used on the later Skylab and Apollo–Soyuz Test Project missions. These cameras varied in design, with image quality improving significantly with each successive model. Two companies made these various camera systems: RCA and Westinghouse. Originally, these slow-scan television (SSTV) cameras, running at 10 frames per second (fps), produced only black-and-white pictures and first flew on the Apollo 7 mission in October 1968. A color camera – using a field-sequential color system – flew on the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969, and every mission after that. The color camera ran at the North American standard 30 fps. The cameras all used image pickup tubes that were initially fragile, as one was irreparably damaged during the live broadcast of the Apollo 12 mission's first moonwalk. Starting with the Apollo 15 mission, a more robust, damage-resistant camera was used on the lunar surface. All of these cameras required signal processing back on Earth to make the frame rate and color encoding compatible with analog broadcast television standards.
A film chain or film island is a television – professional video camera with one or more projectors aligned into the photographic lens of the camera. With two or more projectors a system of front-surface mirrors that can pop-up are used in a multiplexer. These mirrors switch different projectors into the camera lens. The camera could be fed live to air for broadcasting through a vision mixer or recorded to a VTR for post-production or later broadcast. In most TV use this has been replaced by a telecine.
A field-sequential color system (FSC) is a color television system in which the primary color information is transmitted in successive images and which relies on the human vision system to fuse the successive images into a color picture. One field-sequential system was developed by Dr. Peter Goldmark for CBS, which was its sole user in commercial broadcasting. It was first demonstrated to the press on September 4, 1940, and first shown to the general public on January 12, 1950. The Federal Communications Commission adopted it on October 11, 1950, as the standard for color television in the United States, but it was later withdrawn.
Walter Balderson is an American television editor and video engineer, who participated in the advent of color television beginning in the early 1950s and later was one of the first editors to use videotape for instant replay on network television sports events. Nominated for three Emmys during his 35-year career with NBC (1949–1984), Balderson won an Emmy in 1977 for "Outstanding Individual Achievement", in recognition of his work on NBC's The First 50 Years special program.
Electronovision was a process used by producer and entrepreneur H. William "Bill" Sargent, Jr. to produce a handful of motion pictures, theatrical plays, and specials in the 1960s and early 1970s using a high-resolution videotape process for production, later transferred to film via kinescope for theatrical release.
Color television as introduced in North America in 1954 is best described as being 'colored' television. The system used the existing black and white signal but with the addition of a component intended only for television receivers designed to show color. By careful application this 'colored' signal was ignored by ordinary TV sets and had negligible effect on the appearance of the black and white image. This meant that color programs were viewable on the many existing black and white receivers which fulfilled a requirement for 'compatibility' desired by the television industry. Once the so-called 'composite' video signal containing the color component had been generated it could be handled just as if it were a black and white signal, eliminating the need to replace much of the existing TV infrastructure. Colorplexer was the RCA name for the equipment that created this 'composite' color signal from three separate images each created in the primary colors, Red, Green and Blue supplied by a color video camera. This process was by the standards of the day quite complex and demanded accurate control of all the various parameters involved if an acceptable color image was to be achieved. The simplification afforded by this 'head end' approach became evident and contributed to the gradual acceptance of color programming over the following decades.
Premiere is the first commercially sponsored television program to be broadcast in color. The program was a variety show which aired as a special presentation on June 25, 1951, on a five-city network hook-up of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television stations. Its airing was an initial step in CBS's brief and unsuccessful campaign to gain public acceptance of its field-sequential method of color broadcasting, which had recently been approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as the first color television broadcasting standard for the United States.
The four-tube television camera, intended for color television studio use, was first developed by RCA in the early 1960s. In this camera, in addition to the usual complement of three tubes for the red, green and blue images, a fourth tube was included to provide luminance detail of a scene. With such a camera, a sharp black and white picture was always assured, as it was not necessary to combine signals from the three colour tubes to provide the luminance detail.
343-line is the number of scan lines in some early electronic monochrome analog television systems. Systems with this number of lines were used with 30 interlaced frames per second the United States by from 1935 to 1938, and with 25 interlaced frames per second in the Soviet Union from 1937 onwards. A similar system was under development in Poland in 1939.
