Technical faculty, aak

Difference between analogue and digital television

Students:

May, 2011

Analogue television

Analog (or analogue) television encodes television picture and sound information and transmits it as an analog signal, one in which the message conveyed by the broadcast signal is a function of deliberate variations in the amplitude and/or frequency of the signal. All systems preceding digital television were analog television systems. The earliest mechanical television systems used spinning disks with patterns of holes punched into the disc to "scan" an image. A similar disk reconstructed the image at the receiver. Synchronization of the receiver disc rotation was handled through sync pulses broadcast with the image information. However these mechanical systems were slow, the images were dim and flickered severely, and the image resolution very low. Camera systems used similar spinning discs and required intensely bright illumination of the subject for the light detector to work. Analog television did not really begin as an industry until the development of the cathode-ray tube, which uses a steered electron beam to "write" lines of electrons across a phosphor coated surface. The electron beam could be swept across the screen much faster than any mechanical disc system, allowing for more closely spaced scan lines and much higher image resolution, while slow-fade phosphors removed image flicker effects. Also far less maintenance was required of an all-electronic system compared to a spinning disc system. Black and white images were the first ones broadcast. They involved a single video signal which varied only in intensity (with brighter and darker parts comprising the image) .

These types of TVs need couple dozens seconds to warm up and begin showing the picture.

Then, colour TVs appeared. Firstly, colour TVs were comparatively expensive, and their contrasts were not so good. Colour television is the technology and transmission of moving images in colour. practices associated with television's

In its most basic form, a colour broadcast can be created by broadcasting three monochrome images, one each in the three colours of red, green and blue (RGB). When displayed together or in fast succession, these images will blend together to produce a single color as seen by the viewer. One of the great technical challenges of introducing color broadcasting was the desire to reduce the high bandwidth, three times that of the existingblack-and-white (B&W) standards, into something more acceptable that would not use up most of the available radio spectrum. After considerable research, the NTSC introduced a system that encoded the colour information separately from the brightness, and greatly reduced the resolution of the colour information in order to conserve bandwidth. The brightness image remained compatible with existing B&W television sets, at slightly reduced resolution, while colour televisions could decode the extra information in the signal and produce a limited-colour display. The higher resolution B&W and lower resolution colour images combine in the eye to produce a seemingly high resolution colour image. The NTSC standard represents a major technical achievement. Although introduced in the U.S. in the 1950s, only a few years after black and white televisions had been standardized there, high prices and lack of broadcast material greatly slowed its acceptance in the marketplace. It was not until the late 1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in some part to the introduction of GE's Porta-Color set in 1966. By the 1970s colour sets had become standard, with all-colour broadcasts becoming common. Colour broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the PAL format until the 1960s, and broadcasts did not start until 1967. By this point many of the technical problems in the early sets had been worked out, and the spread of color sets in Europe was fairly rapid. Most major markets in North America and Europe were all colour by the mid-1970s, and by the 1980s B&W sets had been pushed into niche markets, notably low-power uses, small portable sets, or use as monitor screens in lower-cost consumer equipment and in the television industry.

After significant invention of colour television, people made big step forward by relaying first satellite signal from Europe to Telstar satellite over North America in 1963, and later, they advanced satellite television as the most important part of history of analogue television. 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.

Digital television
Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of audio and video by digital signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV. Digital television supports many different picture formats defined by the combination of size, aspect ratio (width to height ratio) and interlacing. With digital terrestrial television broadcasting, the range of formats can be broadly divided into two categories: HDTV and SDTV. These terms by themselves are not very precise, and many subtle intermediate cases exist. High-definition television (or HDTV) is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems (standard-definition TV, or SDTV, or SD). HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD. Early HDTV broadcasting used analog techniques, but today HDTV is digitally broadcast using video compression. Standard-definition television (or SDTV) is a television system that has a resolution that meets standards but is not considered to be either enhanced-definition television (EDTV) or high-definition television (HDTV). The term is usually used in reference to digital television, in particular when broadcasting at the same (or similar) resolution as analog systems. A broadcaster may opt to use a standard-definition digital signal instead of an HDTV signal, because current convention allows the bandwidth of a DTV channel (or "multiplex") to be subdivided into multiple subchannels (similar to what most FM stations offer with HD Radio), providing multiple feeds of entirely different programming on the same channel. This ability to provide either a single HDTV feed or multiple lower-resolution feeds is often referred to as distributing one's "bit budget" or multicasting. This can sometimes be arranged automatically, using a statistical multiplexer (or "stat-mux"). With some implementations, image resolution may be less directly limited by bandwidth; for example in DVB-T, broadcasters can choose from several different modulation schemes, giving them the option to reduce the transmission bitrate and make reception easier for more distant or mobile viewers.

Types of HD TVs
3D TV

3D-ready TV sets are those that can operate in 3D mode (in addition to regular 2D mode), in conjunction with a set-top-box and LCD shutter glasses, where the TV tells the glasses which eye should see the image being exhibited at the moment, creating a stereoscopic image.

LCD TV

Liquid-crystal display televisions (LCD TV) are television sets that use LCD technology to produce images. LCD televisions are thinner and lighter than CRTs of similar display size, and are available in much larger sizes. When manufacturing costs fell, this combination of features made LCDs practical for television receivers.

Plasma TV

A plasma display panel (PDP) is a type of flat panel display common to large TV displays (80 cm/30 in or larger). They are called "plasma" displays because the technology utilizes small cells containing electrically charged ionized gases, or what are in essence chambers more commonly known as fluorescent lamps.

Digital vs Analogue
What makes digital television so special? A digital image isn't inherently better than an analog image, and in some cases it can be worse. For the same amount of bandwidth, you can stuff a lot more information into a digital signal than an analog signal. A digital signal doesn't produce the same problems with the picture we see on a distant analog television, either. And television in the digital age won't be limited to video and audio; our televisions will become truly interactive. Combined with HDTV and digital sound, this means a better picture, better sound, and digital data .

Both analog and digital signals can be used to transmit television station broadcasts to television sets. Yet, in recent years, digital transmissions have supplanted analog as the preferred broadcast technology. While analog signals are less expensive to emit and maintain, digital signals have proven to be a more effective in transmitting picture and sound to televisions.