HOW TELEVISION WORKS?

A Simplified Viewpoint

INTRODUCTION
A television produces a series of tiny dots on a screen that, when seen as a whole, appear as an image. Older televisions rely on a cathode-ray tube to produce images, and operate with an analog signal. As technology has advanced and broadcast signals transitioned from analog to digital, plasma and LCD (liquid crystal display) televisions were created. These TVs are more compact and have crisper pictures than their cathode-ray counterparts because they use a thin grid of pixels to create images rather than a vacuum tube.

THE EYES AND THE BRAIN

Most kinds of television work from the same basic principle. The tiny dots of light produced on the TV screen, called pixels, flash according to a specific pattern provided by the video signal. A person's eyes transmit this pattern to the brain, where it is interpreted as a recognizable image. The television set refreshes these patterns hundreds of times per second faster than the human eye can see which gives the illusion of movement.

FROM STUDIO TO VIEWER

Television content is developed in a studio from a variety of sources
Live televised events

Pre-recorded events
Combination of both

SATELLITE T.V.
Satellite television is television delivered by the means of communications satellite and received by an outdoor antenna, usually a parabolic mirror generally referred to as a satellite dish, and as far as household usage is concerned, a satellite receiver either in the form of an external set-top box or a satellite tuner module built into a TV set. Satellite TV tuners are also available as a card or a USB stick to be attached to a personal computer. In many areas of the world satellite television provides a wide range of channels and services, often to areas that are not serviced by terrestrial or cable providers. Direct broadcast satellite television comes to the general public in two distinct flavors - analog and digital. This necessitates either having an analog satellite receiver or a digital satellite receiver. Analog satellite television is being replaced by digital satellite television and the latter is becoming available in a better quality known as high-definition television.

SATELLITE T.V. RECEPTION

TECHNOLOGY
Satellites used for television signals are generally in either naturally highly elliptical (with inclination of +/-63.4 degrees and orbital period of about 12 hours, also known as Molniya orbit) or geostationary orbit 37,000 km (22,300 miles) above the earths equator. Satellite television, like other communications relayed by satellite, starts with a transmitting antenna located at an uplink facility. Uplink satellite dishes are very large, as much as 9 to 12 meters (30 to 40 feet) in diameter. The increased diameter results in more accurate aiming and increased signal strength at the satellite. The uplink dish is pointed toward a specific satellite and the uplinked signals are transmitted within a specific frequency range, so as to be received by one of the transponders tuned to that frequency range aboard that satellite. The transponder 'retransmits' the signals back to Earth but at a different frequency band (a process known as translation, used to avoid interference with the uplink signal), typically in the C-band (48 GHz) or Ku-band (1218 GHz) or both. The leg of the signal path from the satellite to the receiving Earth station is called the downlink

TRANSMISSION OF AUDIO AND VIDEO SIGNALS

The image captured is combined with other electronic content (text and graphics) plus audio. The combined image is amplified and transmitted via AM (amplitude modulation) and FM (frequency modulation) carrier waves to either a satellite feed or from direct transmission to a television receiver.

THE RECEIVER DECODES THE SIGNAL

The electronic signal is decoded by the receiver; splitting the FM wave to the audio section and the AM wave to the video section of the television.

THE BLACK-AND-WHITE TV SIGNAL

In a black-and-white TV, the screen is coated with white phosphor and the electron beam "paints" an image onto the screen by moving the electron beam across the phosphor a line at a time.

To "paint" the entire screen, electronic circuits inside the TV use the magnetic coils to move the electron beam in a "raster scan" pattern across and down the screen. The beam paints one line across the screen from left to right. It then quickly flies back to the left side, moves down slightly and paints another horizontal line, and so on down the screen, like this:

The Black-andWhite TV Signal

The blue lines represent lines that the electron beam is "painting" on the screen from left to right, while the red dashed lines represent the beam flying back to the left. When the beam reaches the right side of the bottom line, it has to move back to the upper left corner of the screen, as represented by the green line in the figure. When the beam is "painting," it is on, and when it is flying back, it is off so that it does not leave a trail on the screen. As the beam paints each line from left to right, the intensity of the beam is changed to create different shades of black, gray and white across the screen. Because the lines are spaced very closely together, your brain integrates them into a single image. A TV screen normally has about 480 lines visible from top to bottom.

EARLY TELEVISION IMAGERY

Early Television did had lower scan rates and reduced image quality. As image capture devices improved after the National Television System Committee (NTSC) established standards by which broadcasters and manufacturers alike adhered. Interlaced transmissions became an early standard.

INTERLACED IMAGES

Interlaced images allow for easier transmission of moving images at higher resolution.
Half pictures in 1/60th a second..30fps.
Trade offs include some image jitter:
Jagged edges from motion occur because the object is in a different location every 1/60 of a second. The even lines show the object in one position while the odd lines show the image in a different position.

INTERLACED IMAGES
Motion artifacts and horizontal "line twitter" are the most notorious NTSC artifacts. The closer you sit to your video display device and the larger the video display device appears, the easier it will be to see NTSC artifacts in images. Some newer television sets employ powerful image processing that can make NTSC artifacts very difficult to find. HDTV (high-definition digital television) includes standards for higher-resolution progressive scanning, which eliminates the video image artifacts we have endured for over 50 years. Unfortunately, many HDTV products have chosen the higher resolution 1080i format (1080 lines interlaced) to use to convert everything regardless of how it was broadcast or recorded. This is unfortunate because interlace artifacts remain quite visible even in the 1080i format.

THE CATHODE-RAY TUBE

The cathode-ray tube (CRT), the oldest version of the television, consists of a vacuum tube with a narrow end and a wide end. The narrow end contains an ion gun, which shoots out a series of charged particles of electricity. A series of electromagnets guide the particles to specific points on the wide end of the tube, the screen that viewers look at. Phosphors, substances that light up when a charged electrical particle hits them, coat the screen's inner surface. The ion gun essentially sprays the image at the screen, much like a paint gun sprays paint onto a surface. Different kinds of phosphors produce different colors, but for color television, only red, blue, and green are needed. Using these colors in various combinations and intensities can create all the colors the human eye can see. As energy travels from the ion gun to the phosphors, it is filtered to strike the exact point on the screen needed to produce a specific hue. In combination, all of these colored pixels create a color image. Cathode-ray tubes are quite heavy due to the large amount of glass they contain, and relatively inefficient, especially when used in large-screen televisions. For this reason, new technologies were developed to make lighter sets with crisper images. In addition, the development of high definition (HD) digital broadcast signals made bigger screens more popular since the images were of higher quality. Plasma and LCD televisions were created in response.

COLOR TV SCREEN

A color TV screen differs from a black-and-white screen in three ways:

Three electron beams (Red, Green, Blue)that move simultaneously across the screen. The screen is coated with red, green and blue phosphors arranged in dots or stripes. On the inside of the tube, very close to the phosphor coating, there is a thin metal screen called a shadow mask. This mask is perforated with very small holes that are aligned with the phosphor dots (or stripes) on the screen.

COLOR TV SCREEN
To create a white dot, red, green and blue beams are fired simultaneously -- the three colors mix together to create white. The absence of signal is black. All other colors on a TV screen are combinations of red, green and blue

HOW COLORS ARE CREATED IN TV

COMPOSITE VIDEO SIGNAL

A signal that contains all three of these components -intensity information, horizontal-retrace signals, and vertical-retrace signals -- is called a composite video signal.

One line of a typical composite video signal looks something like this:

The horizontal-retrace signals are 5-microsecond (abbreviated as "us" in the figure) pulses at zero volts. Electronics inside the TV can detect these pulses and use them to trigger the beam's horizontal retrace. The actual signal for the line is a varying wave between 0.5 volts and 2.0 volts, with 0.5 volts representing black and 2 volts representing white. This signal drives the intensity circuit for the electron beam. In a black-and-white TV, this signal can consume about 3.5 megahertz (MHz) of bandwidth, while in a color set the limit is about 3.0 MHz. A vertical-retrace pulse is similar to a horizontal-retrace pulse but is 400 to 500 microseconds long. The vertical-retrace pulse is serrated with horizontal-retrace pulses in order to keep the horizontal-retrace circuit in the TV synchronized.

Following these eight cycles, a phase shift in the chrominance signal indicates the color to display. The amplitude of the signal determines the saturation. The following table shows you the relationship between color and phase:

Color Burst Yellow Red Magenta Blue Cyan Green

Phase 0 degrees 15 degrees 75 degrees 135 degrees 195 degrees 255 degrees 315 degrees

A black-and-white TV filters out and ignores the chrominance signal. A color TV picks it out of the signal and decodes it, along with the normal intensity signal, to determine how to modulate the three color beams.

THE PLASMA SCREEN

A plasma screen television consists of a number of tiny cells filled with neon and xenon gases. Each cell is linked to an electrode, which, when fired, excites the gases contained in the cell. The gases emit charge particles, much like the ion gun, that interact with phosphors coating the glass inside each cell. The phosphors light up, creating the image seen on the television screen. The large number of cells in a plasma screen makes for a great number of pixels, rendering a clearer and brighter image. Compared to other technologies, plasma TVs produce some of deepest blacks, which means that the contrast ratio is very high. They also have very high refresh rates, so images with a lot of motion don't blur as they can on other televisions. If the image remains static, however, it can burn into the screen, creating a permanent discoloration; this is more common in older plasma TVs, and can also occur with CRT screens. Plasma screens can be set to be very bright, which requires a lot of electricity. They also tend to be thicker than LCD televisions, although much thinner than CRTs.

THE LCD SCREEN

LCD televisions also use cells to create images. Rather than exciting gases as plasma TVs do, however, the cells contain a set of red, blue, and green filters covered by a layer of liquid crystals sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Depending on the display type, each cell is linked to either electrodes or thin film transistors (TFT), which trigger the necessary cells to create the image. A backlight most often cold-cathode fluorescent lamp lights up the screen so the image can be seen. While LCDs are very light and thin, they are subject to "dead" pixels, where one or more cells on the screen do not change. Viewing LCD screens from an angle can also lower the picture quality. They have slower response times than plasma or CRT televisions as well, so images can "ghost" or blur in movement. More recent versions of the LCD television use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the light source rather than cold-cathode fluorescent lamps. LED televisions require less electricity than regular LCD screens, and take up even less space. Also, LEDs generally emit a brighter white light, making these screens especially vivid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television Britannica Encyclopedia http://www.tvhistory.tv/index.html

www.howstuffworks.com