Vintage: That Pesky Television Test Pattern
source: http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=38895
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What came first, television or the television test pattern? By all accounts, the once ubiquitous, static bullseye that appeared on kinescopes and cathode ray tubes from the 40s through the 70s before stations began airing their scheduled programs (or when malfunctions occured) may not have preceeded the actual invention of television, which surprisingly began during the 1880s, but it was the first real transmission that was seen on TV. Although the earliest dimensional image to appear on the screen in the mid-thirties on NBC’s experimental station W2XBS was a rubberized model of Felix the Cat (the only object that would not melt under intensely hot studio lights), the test pattern was the most consistently broadcast image since the early twenties.
On Design Observer today, Steve Heller uncovers the arcana of television test patterns, Here are a few lines:
The origin of the pattern is a story of form following function. Aesthetics were irrelevant to the primary purpose, and the technical draftsmen who anonymously designed it could have never predicted that decades later it would become a nostalgic icon. The intent was to enable engineers, who in the so-called "pre-television" days were the only persons to actually receive broadcasts, to calibrate the extremely small, very crude black and white scans that became the TV picture. While the circular target may seem odd given the rectangular shape of even the earliest screens, in fact, the initial test patterns conformed to the circular shape of an oscilloscope that showed engineers the electrical equivalent of an image in the form of a wave. But there was an even more deliberate rationale.
Read the whole thing following the link.
On Design Observer today, Steve Heller uncovers the arcana of television test patterns, Here are a few lines:
The origin of the pattern is a story of form following function. Aesthetics were irrelevant to the primary purpose, and the technical draftsmen who anonymously designed it could have never predicted that decades later it would become a nostalgic icon. The intent was to enable engineers, who in the so-called "pre-television" days were the only persons to actually receive broadcasts, to calibrate the extremely small, very crude black and white scans that became the TV picture. While the circular target may seem odd given the rectangular shape of even the earliest screens, in fact, the initial test patterns conformed to the circular shape of an oscilloscope that showed engineers the electrical equivalent of an image in the form of a wave. But there was an even more deliberate rationale.
Read the whole thing following the link.
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