Tag: television

How does a magnet change the picture on a television

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does a magnet change the picture on a television—does this hurt the TV?

When you hold a magnet up to the front of a television, you are introducing an additional magnetic field in the system. This field exerts forces on the moving electrons inside the tube and they are deflected. The picture is distorted. With a black and white television, no harm is done because there is nothing to magnetize inside the picture tube. But color television picture tubes contain metal shadow masks that can become permanently magnetic. The picture remains distorted, even after you remove the magnet. To clear up the “damage”, you would have to demagnetize the picture tube. Although this is not a particularly difficult task, it requires a demagnetizing coil and is best done by a professional repairperson. The bottom line is, don’t play with magnets near a color television set.

How does the horizontal sync signal work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does the horizontal sync signal work?

The brightness information comes to the television as a steady stream. While the television knows that this information should control the brightness of adjacent spots on the screen, from left to right, it needs to be told when each horizontal line begins and when each vertical sweep begins. It knows that a new line is coming when the brightness information contains a “blacker-than-black” level. This level seems to say that the electron gun should not only stop sending electrons at the screen, it should send less than no electrons at the screen! Actually, this level is an instruction to the television’s electronics, telling the television to bring its electron beam back to the left side of the screen to begin a new horizontal line. A long “blacker-than-black” level is an instruction to the television to begin a new vertical scan down the screen.

How does the picture get to the TV itself? How does a radio wave make a picture?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does the picture get to the TV itself? How does a radio wave make a picture?

The television can reconstruct an image from a series of brightness measurements. It takes these brightness measurement and uses them to control the electron beam as it sweeps across the screen of the picture tube. It paints the picture one dot at a time and then starts over when it has finished. Thus all that the radio wave has to send to the television is a series of brightness measurements and some synchronization information (when to start a horizontal scan and when to start a vertical scan). It uses an AM technique to send the brightness measurements on a radio wave. The transmitter’s power varies up and down to indicate brightness just as an AM radio transmitter’s power varies up and down to indicate which way to push the speaker cone.

How does the picture tube know where to push the electrons onto the right areas/…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does the picture tube know where to push the electrons onto the right areas/dots?

The television and picture tube simply scans the electron beam across the screen, one horizontal row after the next as it moves “slowly” down the screen. When it gets to the bottom of the screen, the picture tube brings the beam back to the top of the screen and starts over again. While the TV is scanning the beam across the set, it uses the signal from the television station to control the intensity of the electron beam and those the brightness of the spots on the screen. It also watches for sync information to know when to begin new horizontal lines and vertical sweeps.