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A Brief History Of Television
The history of television has been a brief but exciting one. In fact, it has been so short that many of our parents were there from the beginning or if you are young enough, your grandparents.
The first milestone in making TV more modern was nothing to do with the TV itself, but in one of its accessories, the VCR.
What began from a simple magnetic wheel design soon grew into the electronic TV. These early beginnings would eventually take us to the 3D 1080P HDTV world and beyond, but it didn’t get there without hitting some milestones along the way.
Early TV’s
The real history of television began with the first mechanical televisions, while it seems shameful to call 16 lines of resolution a milestone, it was for the time. Soon after came the real millstone of the era - the Cathode Ray Tube. This would in one form or another, be the basis for all televisions for nearly 100 years. The next milestone was the NTSC standard. This is what the FCC made our TV broadcasting standard until HDTV took over. It called for 525 lines of vertical resolution, played back at 30 frames per second with interlaced video and the audio being carried by frequency modulation. The next milestone and a direct precursor to modern television started in 1953 with the introduction of color TV broadcasts. More information about this can be found at http://www.thehistoryoftelevision.com/.
Modern TV’s
The first milestone in making TV more modern was nothing to do with the TV itself, but in one of its accessories, the VCR. Now, people did not need to be actually watching their television sets when the program they wanted to see came on. They could setup a video cassette recorder to record the show for playback later when it was more convenient for them. The VCR also became a standard for watching Hollywood movies at home. This was the first nail in the coffin of Hollywood’s power. Next came the DVD. This was an optical media that had much higher resolution and a cleaner picture than VCR’s could attain due to its all digital nature. This milestone whet peoples appetites for increasing picture quality an eventually led to HDTV, one of the largest milestones since color television. This brought the number of lines of resolution up from 525 to 1080. The difference was night and day.
The replacement of DVD with Blu Ray was another milestone in the history of television. Now the Hollywood movies we brought home could be viewed in the modern 1080p format. The latest milestone for television is 3D. This is agued to no end as to whether or not it really is a milestone or just a fad. Originally theaters used 3D to try to bring people out of their home theaters and back into the real theaters. It was no time, however, before 3D made the move to home theaters. Theater owners will have to come up with something new to drag people from their televisions again.
The Future Of TV’s
The future of TV is as bright as has been the history of television. We look ahead to the next milestone, the 4K resolution. This refers to the horizontal resolution of the picture. Compared to 1080P, this will yield a 4 to 6 fold improvement in resolution depending on the vertical resolution used. More information about this can be found at http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/.