OKAY, I hope you’re sitting comfortably because a whole mind blowing world of information
is coming right at you….
Eesh.
Televisions.
They’ve been a somewhat integral part of the human experience since our mate Filo Farnsworth
pioneered the technology in 1927.
Now, almost 100 years later, billions of people use them every day, but not many of them can
tell you exactly how they work.
Hello and welcome back to Life’s Biggest Questions, I am Rebecca Felgate and today
we’re asking How Do Televisions Work?
Before we launch right on in to this video, I just want to remind you guys to always hit
the like button, and if you want to be the first to hear a big answer, make sure you
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So, Television is a four pronged party that involves capture, a sender,a receiver and
a player.
SO, a camera tales a picture of a scene, then turns pictures into a row of individual dots
we call pixels.
Later, signals tell television sets how to display these pixels… but before that.
They have to be transmitted.
Analogue television transmits signals to television sets via airwaves, like radio but with picture
messages, too.
Digital televisions send these messages via satellite.
Both analogue and digital televisions receive these respective signals and break them down
into audio and visual messages.
The audio feeds into the audio circuit to replicate the sound waves as they were recorded.
The video, however, is sent down the cathode ray.
Shout out to all the Radiohead fans out there who are hooked back up.
SO, cathode rays and jargon aside, what happens with your basic, classic TV is that images
are created by three separate beams of light in each primary colour that blend together
to recreate the images captured.
These lights are directed in place by electromagnets, which allows them to know which area of the
screen to hit at one time.
Now the Youtube channel, The Slow Mo Guys actually made an incredible video about how
picture is created on television.
Shooting at three hundred and eighty thousand frames per second, they show that classic
TV’s create images line from line, left to right.
The images are created using the three primary colours in various intensities.
It happens so fast, like microsecond fast, that our eyes trick us into thinking we’re
seeing a complete image.
With LCD televisions, there is no cathode ray directing beans of light, which is why
they’re much more compact.
These tvs have pixels that are electronically switched on or off to make a picture.
These pixels are made of red, blue and green sub pixels that control the colour the pixel
is generating.
Not to get super technical, but the reason why its hard to get true black on an LCD screen
is because the sub pixels are dimmed but still backlit.
With OLED screens, this is not the case because each pixel and subpixel is individually lit.
So yeah… the whole process of television is kind of mind boggling.
The long and short of it is that sound and light signals are captured and transmitted,
then received and recreated using superfast sound waves and light beams.
Get it?
Got it?
Great.
As always with a Life’s Biggest Questions video, I would strongly encourage those interested
in the topics we discuss to delve further into the question by researching around the
discussion points…for example if you want to know the finer physics of a cathode ray,
please be my guest….
Meanwhile, I think I am done here!
Do you have anything to add to this big answer?
Let me know in the comments section down below.
Also please do leave a thumbs up if you liked our video!
I am Rebecca Felgate, I’ll catch you in the next video, but for now…stay curious,
stay alert and never ever stop questioning.
If you want to continue on your questioning binge, why not check out our biggest Science
Questions playlist and our biggest what ifs.