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Home Glossary HDTV DVD Consumer Television Consumer Video : Television Introduction
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When a color TV needs to create a red dot, it fires the red beam at the red phosphor. Similarly for green and blue dots. To create a white dot, red, green and blue beams are fired simultaneously -- the three colors mix together to create white. To create a black dot, all three beams are turned off as they scan past the dot. All other colors on a TV screen are combinations of red, green and blue. A color TV signal starts off looking just like a black-and-white signal. An extra chrominance signal is added by superimposing a 3.579545 MHz sine wave onto the standard black-and-white signal. Right after the horizontal sync pulse, eight cycles of a 3.579545 MHz sine wave are added as a color burst. Following these eight cycles, a phase shift in the chrominance signal indicates the color to display. The amplitude of the signal determines the saturation. The following table shows you the relationship between color and phase:
A black-and-white TV filters out and ignores the
chrominance signal. A color TV picks it out of the signal and
decodes it, along with the normal intensity signal, to
determine how to modulate the three color beams. Sound and video are completely separate in an analog TV. There are five standard ways to get a signal into your TV set:
A typical TV signal as described above requires 4 MHz of bandwidth. By the time you add in sound, something called a vestigial sideband and a little buffer space, a TV signal requires 6 MHz of bandwidth. Therefore, the FCC allocated three bands of frequencies in the radio spectrum, chopped into 6-MHz slices, to accommodate TV channels:
To the left of the video carrier is the vestigial lower sideband (0.75 MHz), and to the right is the full upper sideband (4 MHz). The sound signal is centered on 5.75 MHz. As an example, a program transmitted on channel 2 has its video carrier at 55.25 MHz and its sound carrier at 59.75 MHz. The tuner in your TV, when tuned to channel 2, extracts the composite video signal and the sound signal from the radio waves that transmitted them to the antenna. VCRs are essentially their own little TV stations. Almost all VCRs have a switch on the back that allows you to select channel 3 or 4. The video tape contains a composite video signal and a separate sound signal. The VCR has a circuit inside that takes the video and sound signals off the tape and turns them into a signal that, to the TV, looks just like the broadcast signal for channel 3 or 4. The cable in cable
TV contains a large number of channels that are transmitted
on the cable. Your cable provider could simply modulate the
different cable-TV programs onto all of the normal frequencies and
transmit that to your house via the cable; then, the tuner in your
TV would accept the signal and you would not need a cable box. Large-dish satellite antennas pick off unencoded or encoded signals being beamed to Earth by satellites. First, you point the dish to a particular satellite, and then you select a particular channel it is transmitting. The set-top box receives the signal, decodes it if necessary and then sends it to channel 3 or 4. Small-dish satellite systems are digital. The TV programs are encoded in MPEG-2 format and transmitted to Earth. The set-top box does a lot of work to decode MPEG-2, then converts it to a standard analog TV signal and sends it to your TV on channel 3 or 4.
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