Technology Connections
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2026
13:14 · 503K views · Nov 18, 2017
Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.
HN commenters recommend it as an especially good explanation of analog TV and CRT shadow masks.
3 comments from Hacker News
So happy to see Technology Connections here, one of my absolute favorite YouTube channels and one that I have learned a lot from. This one on "how analog tv works" I thought was especially good. this video
Alec Watson from Technology Connections did an entire series on this subject: (How Analog Color TV Works: The Beginnings) this video Then the playlist on TV stuff: [LINK] Don't blame me for the rabbit hole :P
It is good that this article exists. It explains how to convert screenshot and video capture provided by DOSBox into web-oriented formats, with some welcome considerations about pixel aspect ratio. This is a good basis! > but in these screenshots we want to retain the crisp and jagged edges that is typical of DOSBox and the old CRT monitors. Therefore we use the -sample option that does not introduce any new colours. Instead it uses nearest-neighbour interpolation (point sampling) to decide the colours of the scaled image. There are 2 ironic things: * modern world drifts away from pixel-to-pixel rendering, and indeed the web page presenting the captures constrains it (img in a div in a main with max-width:42em. So, web viewing does introduce some smoothing * the CRTs-based screens of the days were not that crisp! Especially the color ones, they had a "shadow mask", a grid of RGB spots which had no reason to be aligned with the pixel locations (this is explained e.g. on "How Analog Color TV Works: The Beginnings" by "Technology Connections" this video or jump straight to this video for explanations and this video for close-to-screen example ) > The screenshots obtained in this manner have an aspect ratio of 8:5 which makes the output look stretched horizontally. Because modern format and/or modern displaying program tend to assume square pixels, which originals were not. Same issue on Amiga (pixel aspect ratio was even different on North-American Amigas and European Amigas) and many ot