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HowStuffWorks / Tech / Electronics / Home Audio & Video / TV Technology

How Television Works

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By: Marshall Brain

Do you understand the technology behind TVs? PETER CADE / GETTY IMAGES

Television is certainly one of the most in uential forces of our time. Through the device called a
television set or TV, you are able to receive news, sports, entertainment, information and commercials.
The average American spends between two and ve hours a day glued to "the tube"!

Have you ever wondered about the technology that makes television possible? How is it that dozens or
hundreds of channels of full-motion video arrive at your house, in many cases for free? How does your
television decode the signals to produce the picture? How will the new digital television signals change
things? If you have ever wondered about your television (or, for that matter, about your computer
monitor), then read on! In this article, we'll answer all of these questions and more. See the next page to
get started.

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Contents
1. TV Pixels and Your Brain
2. TV Motion and Your Brain
3. The Cathode Ray Tube Advertisement

4. Inside a CRT
5. TV Steering Coils
6. TV Phosphors
7. The Black-and-White TV Signal
8. Painting the TV Screen
9. Composite Video Signal
10. Color TV Screen
11. Color TV Signal
12. TV Broadcasts
13. VCR and Cable Signals
14. Satellite TV Signals
15. Digital TV
16. Monitors vs. TVs

TV Pixels and Your Brain

Let's start at the beginning with a quick note about your brain. There are two amazing things about your
brain that make television possible. By understanding these two facts, you gain a good bit of insight into
why televisions are designed the way they are.

The rst principle is this: If you divide a still image into a collection of small colored dots, your brain
will reassemble the dots into a meaningful image. This is no small feat, as any researcher who has
tried to program a computer to understand images will tell you. The only way we can see that this is
actually happening is to blow the dots up so big that our brains can no longer assemble them, like this:

Most people, sitting right up close to their computer screens, cannot

tell what this is a picture of -- the dots are too big for your brain to
handle. If you stand 10 to 15 feet away from your monitor, however,
your brain will be able to assemble the dots in the image and you will
clearly see that it is the baby's face. By standing at a distance, the dots
become small enough for your brain to integrate them into a
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recognizable image.

Both televisions and computer screens (as well as newspaper and

magazine photos) rely on this fusion-of-small-colored-dots capability
in the human brain to chop pictures up into thousands of individual
elements. On a TV or computer screen, the dots are called pixels. The resolution of your computer's
screen might be 800x600 pixels, or maybe 1024x768 pixels.

TV Motion and Your Brain

The human brain's second amazing feature relating to television is this: If you
divide a moving scene into a sequence of still pictures and show the still images
in rapid succession, the brain will reassemble the still images into a single,
moving scene. Take, for example, these four frames from the example video:

Each one of these images is slightly different from the next. If you look carefully at
the baby's left foot (the foot that is visible), you will see that it is rising in these
1
four frames. The toy also moves forward very slightly. By putting together 15 or
more subtly different frames per second, the brain integrates them into a moving
scene. Fifteen per second is about the minimum possible -- any fewer than that
and it looks jerky.

When you download and watch the MPEG le offered at the beginning of this
section, you see both of these processes at work simultaneously. Your brain is
fusing the dots of each image together to form still images and then fusing the
2
separate still images together into a moving scene. Without these two
capabilities, TV as we know it would not be possible.

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The Cathode Ray Tube

A few TVs in use today rely on a device known as the cathode

ray tube, or CRT, to display their images. LCDs and plasma
displays are other common technologies. It is even possible to
make a television screen out of thousands of ordinary 60-watt
light bulbs! You may have seen something like this at an outdoor
event like a football game. Let's start with the CRT, however.

The terms anode and cathode are used in electronics as

synonyms for positive and negative terminals. For example, you could refer to the positive terminal of a
battery as the anode and the negative terminal as the cathode.

In a cathode ray tube, the "cathode" is a heated lament (not unlike the lament in a normal light bulb).
The heated lament is in a vacuum created inside a glass "tube." The "ray" is a stream of electrons that
naturally pour off a heated cathode into the vacuum.

Electrons are negative. The anode is positive, so it attracts the electrons pouring off the cathode. In a
TV's cathode ray tube, the stream of electrons is focused by a focusing anode into a tight beam and
then accelerated by an accelerating anode. This tight, high-speed beam of electrons ies through the
vacuum in the tube and hits the at screen at the other end of the tube. This screen is coated with
phosphor, which glows when struck by the beam.

Inside a CRT

As you can see in the drawing, there's not a whole lot to a basic Advertisement

cathode ray tube.

There is a cathode and a pair (or more) of anodes. There is the

phosphor-coated screen. There is a conductive coating inside
the tube to soak up the electrons that pile up at the screen-end
of the tube. However, in this diagram you can see no way to
"steer" the beam -- the beam will always land in a tiny dot right in
the center of the screen.

That's why, if you look inside any TV set, you will nd that the tube is wrapped in coils of wires. On the
next page, you'll get a good view of steering coils.

TV Steering Coils

The following pictures give you three different views of a typical

set of steering coils:

The steering coils are simply copper windings (see How

Electromagnets Work for details on coils). These coils are able
to create magnetic elds inside the tube, and the electron beam
responds to the elds. One set of coils creates a magnetic eld
that moves the electron beam vertically, while another set
moves the beam horizontally. By controlling the voltages in the
coils, you can position the electron beam at any point on the
screen.

(Note the large black electrode hooked

to the tube near the screen -- it is
connected internally to the conductive
coating.)

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TV Phosphors

A phosphor is any material that, when exposed to radiation,

emits visible light. The radiation might be ultraviolet light or a
beam of electrons. Any uorescent color is really a phosphor --
uorescent colors absorb invisible ultraviolet light and emit
visible light at a characteristic color.

In a CRT, phosphor coats the inside of the screen. When the

Electrical elds may cause a large
number of ghost sightings. Learn about electron beam strikes the phosphor, it makes the screen glow. In
electrical elds and nd out how a black-and-white screen, there is one phosphor that glows
electrical elds relate to ghosts.
white when struck. In a color screen, there are three phosphors
arranged as dots or stripes that emit red, green and blue light.
There are also three electron beams to illuminate the three different colors together.

There are thousands of different phosphors that have been formulated. They are characterized by their
emission color and the length of time emission lasts after they are excited.

The Black-and-White TV Signal

In a black-and-white TV, the screen is coated with white

phosphor and the electron beam "paints" an image onto the
screen by moving the electron beam across the phosphor a line
at a time. To "paint" the entire screen, electronic circuits inside
the TV use the magnetic coils to move the electron beam in a
"raster scan" pattern across and down the screen. The beam
paints one line across the screen from left to right. It then quickly
ies back to the left side, moves down slightly and paints
another horizontal line, and so on down the screen. Advertisement

In this gure, the blue lines represent lines that the electron beam is "painting" on the screen from left to
right, while the red dashed lines represent the beam ying back to the left. When the beam reaches the
right side of the bottom line, it has to move back to the upper left corner of the screen, as represented
by the green line in the gure. When the beam is "painting," it is on, and when it is ying back, it is off so
that it does not leave a trail on the screen. The term horizontal retrace is used to refer to the beam
moving back to the left at the end of each line, while the term vertical retrace refers to its movement
from bottom to top.

As the beam paints each line from left to right, the intensity of the beam is changed to create different
shades of black, gray and white across the screen. Because the lines are spaced very closely together,
your brain integrates them into a single image. A TV screen normally has about 480 lines visible from
top to bottom. In the next section, you'll nd out how the TV "paints" these lines on the screen.

Painting the TV Screen

Standard TVs use an interlacing technique when painting the screen. In this technique, the screen is
painted 60 times per second but only half of the lines are painted per frame. The beam paints every
other line as it moves down the screen -- for example, every odd-numbered line. Then, the next time it
moves down the screen it paints the even-numbered lines, alternating back and forth between even-
numbered and odd-numbered lines on each pass. The entire screen, in two passes, is painted 30 times
every second. The alternative to interlacing is called progressive scanning, which paints every line on
the screen 60 times per second. Most computer monitors use progressive scanning because it
signi cantly reduces icker.

Because the electron beam is painting all 525 lines 30 times per second, it paints a total of 15,750 lines
per second. (Some people can actually hear this frequency as a very high-pitched sound emitted when
the television is on.)

When a television station wants to broadcast a signal to your TV, or when your VCR wants to display the
movie on a video tape on your TV, the signal needs to mesh with the electronics controlling the beam so
that the TV can accurately paint the picture that the TV station or VCR sends. The TV station or VCR
therefore sends a well-known signal to the TV that contains three different parts:

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Intensity information for the beam as it paints each line
Horizontal-retrace signals to tell the TV when to move the beam back at the end of each line
Vertical-retrace signals 60 times per second to move the beam from bottom-right to top-left

So how does this information get transmitted to the TV? Read the next page to nd out.

Composite Video Signal

A signal that contains all three of these components -- intensity

information, horizontal-retrace signals, and vertical-retrace
signals -- is called a composite video signal. A composite-video
input on a VCR is normally a yellow RCA jack. One line of a
typical composite video signal looks something like the image
A typical composite video signal
on this page.

The horizontal-retrace signals are 5-microsecond (abbreviated as "us" in the gure) pulses at zero volts.
Electronics inside the TV can detect these pulses and use them to trigger the beam's horizontal retrace.
The actual signal for the line is a varying wave between 0.5 volts and 2.0 volts, with 0.5 volts
representing black and 2 volts representing white. This signal drives the intensity circuit for the electron
beam. In a black-and-white TV, this signal can consume about 3.5 megahertz (MHz) of bandwidth, while
in a color set the limit is about 3.0 MHz.

A vertical-retrace pulse is similar to a horizontal-retrace pulse but is 400 to 500 microseconds long. The
vertical-retrace pulse is serrated with horizontal-retrace pulses in order to keep the horizontal-retrace
circuit in the TV synchronized.

Color TV Screen

A color TV screen differs from a black-and-white screen in three ways:

There are three electron beams that move simultaneously across

the screen. They are named the red, green and blue beams.
The screen is not coated with a single sheet of phosphor as in a
black-and-white TV. Instead, the screen is coated with red, green and
blue phosphors arranged in dots or stripes. If you turn on your TV or Advertisement

computer monitor and look closely at the screen with a magnifying

glass, you will be able to see the dots or stripes.
On the inside of the tube, very close to the phosphor coating, there is a thin metal
screen called a shadow mask. This mask is perforated with very small holes that are
aligned with the phosphor dots (or stripes) on the screen.

When a color TV needs to create a red dot, it res the red beam at the red phosphor. Similarly for green
and blue dots. To create a white dot, red, green and blue beams are red 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.

In the next section, you'll learn about the color TV signal.

Color TV Signal

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. Here is the relationship between color and phase:

Burst = 0 degrees
Yellow = 15 degrees
Red = 75 degrees
Magenta = 135 degrees
Blue = 195 degrees
Cyan = 255 degrees
Green = 315 degrees

A black-and-white TV lters out and ignores the chrominance signal. A color TV picks it out of the signal
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and decodes it, along with the normal intensity signal, to determine how to modulate the three color
beams.

TV Broadcasts

Now you are familiar with a standard composite video signal. Note
that we have not mentioned sound. If your VCR has a yellow
composite-video jack, you've probably noticed that there are separate
sound jacks right next to it. Sound and video are completely separate
in an analog TV.
The composite video signal is
amplitude-modulated into the You are probably familiar with ve different ways to get a signal into
appropriate frequency, and then
the sound is frequency-modulated your TV set:
(+/- 25 KHz) as a separate signal.

Broadcast programming received through an antenna

VCR or DVD player that connects to the antenna terminals
Cable TV arriving in a set-top box that connects to the antenna
terminals
Large (6 to 12 feet) satellite-dish antenna arriving in a set-top box that connects to the antenna
terminals
Small (1 to 2 feet) satellite-dish antenna arriving in a set-top box that connects to the antenna
terminals

The rst four signals use standard NTSC analog waveforms as described in the previous sections. As a
starting point, let's look at how normal broadcast signals arrive at your house.

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:

54 to 88 MHz for channels 2 to 6

174 to 216 MHz for channels 7 through 13
470 to 890 MHz for UHF channels 14 through 83
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The composite TV signal described in the previous sections can be broadcast to your house on any
available channel. The composite video signal is amplitude-modulated into the appropriate frequency,
and then the sound is frequency-modulated (+/- 25 KHz) as a separate signal.

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.

VCR and Cable Signals

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. Unfortunately, that approach would make theft of cable services very easy,
so the signals are encoded in funny ways. The set-top box is a decoder. You select the channel on it, it
decodes the right signal and then does the same thing a VCR does to transmit the signal to the TV on
channel 3 or 4.

Satellite TV Signals

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
Small-dish
satellite system format and transmitted to Earth. The set-top box does a lot of work to decode Advertisement
PHOTO
MPEG-2, then converts it to a standard analog TV signal and sends it to your TV
COURTESY
DIRECTV on channel 3 or 4. See How Satellite TV Works to learn more.

Digital TV

The latest buzz is digital TV, also known as DTV or HDTV (high-
de nition TV). DTV uses MPEG-2 encoding just like the satellite
systems do, but digital TV allows a variety of new, larger screen
formats.

The formats include:

Sony Wega 42" XBR Plasma TV with 480p - 640x480 pixels progressive
built-in HDTV tuner
720p - 1280x720 pixels progressive
PHOTO COURTESY SONY ELECTRONICS
1080i - 1920x1080 pixels interlaced
1080p - 1920x1080 pixels progressive

A digital TV decodes the MPEG-2 signal and displays it just like a computer monitor does, giving it
incredible resolution and stability. There is also a wide range of set-top boxes that can decode the
digital signal and convert it to analog to display it on a normal TV. For more information, check out How
Digital Television Works.

Monitors vs. TVs

Your computer probably has a "VGA monitor" that looks a lot like a TV but is smaller, has a lot more
pixels and has a much crisper display. The CRT and electronics in a monitor are much more precise than
is required in a TV; a computer monitor needs higher resolutions. In addition, the plug on a VGA monitor
is not accepting a composite signal -- a VGA plug separates out all of the signals so they can be
interpreted by the monitor more precisely. Here's a typical VGA pinout:

pin 1 - Red video

pin 2 - Green video
pin 3 - Blue video
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pin 4 - Ground
pin 5 - Self test
pin 6 - Red ground
pin 7 - Green ground
pin 8 - Blue ground
pin 9 - No pin
pin 10 - Digital ground
pin 11 - Reserved
pin 12 - Reserved
pin 13 - Horizontal sync
pin 14 - Vertical sync
pin 15 - Reserved

This table makes the point that the signals for the three beams as well as both horizontal and vertical
sync signals are all transmitted separately. See How Computer Monitors Work for details.

For more information on television, display types and related topics, check out the links on the next
page.

TV FAQ

Where is the cheapest place to buy a TV?

Walmart and Best Buy seem to post the most TV deals and both retailers are known for offering
great markdowns. Amazon is also a great place to score some deals if you already know what
you want and are willing to skip the in-store visit to check the TV out on display.

What is the best TV to buy in 2021?

Every TV has pros and cons. Even the best TVs have at least one drawback — the steep price
you're likely to pay for top-of-the-line tech. However, the best TVs currently include the Vizio M-
Series Quantum and Sony's Bravia X900H Series. OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays are
less common and very expensive, but if you're willing to splurge, check out the LG OLED CX series
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and the Samsung Q900TS.

When is the cheapest time to buy a TV?

Black Friday, or the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States, offers some of the deepest
discounts on TVs. But the second best time to score a deal is in the weeks leading up to the
Super Bowl, which always takes place on the rst Sunday in February.

Lots More Information

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What if I shot my TV?
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How Digital Television Works
How HDTV Works
All About Television
How Satellite TV Works
How Projection Television Works
How Home Theater Works
How Jumbo TV Screens Work
How Plasma Displays Work
How LCDs Work
How Computer Monitors Work
How DVDs Work
How VCRs Work
Inside a TV Remote Control
How Radio Works
How the Radio Spectrum Works

More Great Links

MPEG Pointers and Resources
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Early Television Foundation - history of TV, with pictures

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