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Practical television systems include equipment for selecting different image sources, mixing images from several sources at once, insertion of pre-recorded video signals, synchronizing signals from many sources, and direct image generation by computer for such purposes as station identification. The facility for housing such equipment, as well as providing space for stages, sets, offices, etc., is called a television studio, and may be located many miles from the transmitter. Communication from the studio to the transmitter is accomplished via a dedicated cable or radio system.
Television signals were originally transmitted exclusively via land-based transmitters. The quality of reception varied greatly, dependent in large part on the location and type of receiving antenna. This led to the proliferation of large rooftop antennas to improve reception in the 1960s, replacing set-top dipole or "rabbit ears" antennas, which however remained popular. Antenna rotors, set-top controlled servo motors to which the mast of the antenna is mounted, to enable rotating the antenna such that it points to the desired transmitter, would also become popular.
In most cities today, cable television providers deliver signals over coaxial or fiber-optic cables for a fee. Signals can also be delivered by radio from satellites in geosynchronous orbit and received by parabolic dish antennas, which are comparatively large for analog signals, but much smaller for digital. Like cable providers, satellite television providers also require a fee, often less than cable systems. The affordability and convenience of digital satellite reception has led to the proliferation of small dish antennas outside many houses and apartments.
Digital systems may be inserted anywhere in the chain to provide better image transmission quality, reduction in transmission bandwidth, special effects, or security of transmission from reception by non-subscribers. A home today might have the choice of receiving analog or HDTV over the air, analog or digital cable with HDTV from a cable television company over coaxial cable, or even from the phone company over fiber optic lines. On the road, television can be received by pocket sized televisions, recorded on tape or digital media players, or played back on wireless phones (mobile or "cell" phones) over a high-speed or "broadband" internet connection.
equipment in an edit suite]]
Thanks to the advances in display technology, there are now several kinds of video displays used in modern TV sets:
Each has its pros and cons. Flat panel LCD and plasma displays have a wide viewing angle (around 178 degrees) so they may best suited for a home theatre with a wide seating arrangement. Rear projection screens do not perform well in daylight or well-lit rooms and so are only suited to darker viewing areas.
A typical resolution of 720×480 and 720x576 means that the television display has 720 pixels across and 480 or 576 pixels on the vertical axis. The higher the resolution on a specified display the sharper the image. Contrast ratio is a measurement of the range between the lightest and darkest points on the screen.
The higher the contrast ratio, the better looking picture there is in terms of richness, deepness, and shadow detail. The brightness of a picture measures how vibrant and impacting the colors are. Measured in equivalent to the amount of candles required to power the image.
On the other hand, the so-called brightness and contrast adjustment controls on televisions and monitors are traditionally used to control different aspects of the picture display. The brightness control shifts the black level, affecting the image intensity or brightness, while the contrast control adjusts the contrast range of the image.
Most of the early electronic TV systems, from the mid-1930s onward, shared the same aspect ratio of 4:3 which was chosen to match the Academy Ratio used in cinema films at the time. This ratio was also square enough to be conveniently viewed on round cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), which were all that could be produced given the manufacturing technology of the time. (Today's CRT technology allows the manufacture of much wider tubes, and the flat-screen technologies which are becoming steadily more popular have no technical aspect ratio limitations at all.) The BBC's television service used a more squarish 5:4 ratio from 1936 to 3 April 1950, when it too switched to a 4:3 ratio. This did not present significant problems, as most sets at the time used round tubes which were easily adjusted to the 4:3 ratio when the transmissions changed.
LE26R41BD HDTV]] In the early 1950s, movie studios moved towards widescreen aspect ratios such as CinemaScope in an effort to distance their product from television. Although this was initially just a gimmick, widescreen is still the format of choice today and 4:3 aspect ratio movies are rare.
Yet the various television systems were not originally designed to be compatible with film at all. Traditional, narrow-screen movies are projected onto a television camera either so that the top of the screens line up to show facial features, or, for films with subtitles, the bottoms. What this means is that filmed newspapers or long captions filling the screen for explanation are cut off at each end. Similarly, while the frame rate of sound films is 24 per second, the screen scanning rate of the NTSC is 29.97 Hz (per second), which requires a complex scanning schedule. That of PAL and SECAM are 50 Hz, which means that films are shortened (and the sound is offkey) by scanning each frame twice for 25 per second.
The switch to digital television systems has been used as an opportunity to change the standard television picture format from the old ratio of 4:3 (1.33:1) to an aspect ratio of 16:9 (approximately 1.78:1). This enables TV to get closer to the aspect ratio of modern widescreen movies, which range from 1.66:1 through 1.85:1 to 2.35:1. There are two methods for transporting widescreen content, the most common of which uses what is called anamorphic widescreen format. This format is very similar to the technique used to fit a widescreen movie frame inside a 1.33:1 35 mm film frame. The image is compressed horizontally when recorded, then expanded again when played back. The anamorphic widescreen 16:9 format was first introduced via European PALplus television broadcasts and then later on "widescreen" Laser Discs and DVDs; the ATSC HDTV system uses straight widescreen format, no horizontal compression or expansion is used.
Recently "widescreen" has spread from television to computing where both desktop and laptop computers are commonly equipped with widescreen displays. There are some complaints about distortions of movie picture ratio due to some DVD playback software not taking account of aspect ratios; but this may subside as the DVD playback software matures. Furthermore, computer and laptop widescreen displays are in the 16:10 aspect ratio both physically in size and in pixel counts, and not in 16:9 of consumer televisions, leading to further complexity. This was a result of widescreen computer display engineers' assumption that people viewing 16:9 content on their computer would prefer that an area of the screen be reserved for playback controls, subtitles or their Taskbar, as opposed to viewing content full-screen.
Displaying a widescreen aspect (rectangular) image on a conventional aspect (square or 4:3) display can be shown:
A conventional aspect (square or 4:3) image on a widescreen aspect (rectangular with longer horizon) display can be shown:
A common compromise is to shoot or create material at an aspect ratio of 14:9, and to lose some image at each side for 4:3 presentation, and some image at top and bottom for 16:9 presentation. In recent years, the cinematographic process known as Super 35 (championed by James Cameron) has been used to film a number of major movies such as Titanic, Legally Blonde, Austin Powers, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (see also: Films shot in Super 35). This process results in a camera-negative which can then be used to create both wide-screen theatrical prints, and standard "full screen" releases for television/VHS/DVD which avoid the need for either "letterboxing" or the severe loss of information caused by conventional "pan-and-scan" cropping.
The European Union has recommended its members to have closed down analogue terrestrial television by 2012. Luxembourg and the Netherlands had already completed their closedowns in 2006, and Finland and Sweden closed down their analogue broadcasts in 2007. Meanwhile, some countries may have difficulties making the 2012 deadline.
Britain started its programme of switching off analogue transmitters in October 2007. At 2am on Wednesday 17 October 2007 the BBC2 transmitter covering the Whitehaven and Copeland areas (NW England) was turned off. The remaining four analogue channels cease broadcasting in the region on Wednesday 14 November. The original five channels will then only be available in digital form, alongside some 15 additional free to air channels.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
