It's The Tube That Makes the Colour

[@roberthorwat6747]

Three states of change in my lifetime. 1. Wonder: Seeing colour TV in the shops. 2. Envy: Seeing colour TV in someone else's house. 3. Pure Joy: Seeing colour TV in your own home. No other technological marvel in my lifetime will ever surpass that. It was a massive paradigm shift that eclipses almost every advance since, with the exception being the VCR. We got our first colour telly around 1972.

[@tuopeeks]

This is my favourite 'trade test film' of all time. We need more of these again. Takes me back, great to see it and happy to watch it many times like when I was a kid. Probably help me into a career in electronics and physics

[@TheRob625]

As a kid I was a geek (I still am, I suppose) and I liked to watch this film when it was shown on BBC2 during the day. So it’s nice to be able to see it again after all these years. Thanks for posting it, ttf2011. But watching it again, I’m amazed at the sheer number of people employed in the manufacturing process: those tubes were almost hand made. No wonder you had to be rich to own a colour TV at the time.

[@phildxyz]

Brilliant! Watched this many times when I was a kid.

[@swingmanic]

Incredible!..I still have my pattern generator that I built 40 years ago when working on the old Pye hybrid sets.

[@davidstone921]

I used to watch this trade test film, when working at Rediffusion probably in 1967. A great technology, now sadly lost!

[@spodonik623]

My Dad worked at Mullards Simonstone from ~1960 to ~1984, shift Engineer in the glass factory where the cones and screens were made.

[@pfield39]

No wonder colour CRTs were so expensive back in the day.

[@TupmaniaTurning]

Great to see that again after many years, even though I'm watching it on a flat, iPad screen! How things change! 😀

[@shaunhw]

The blue gun looks a bit low on that tube showing this... ;-) But it is really great to see this again!

[@JoshuaGalka]

Nice!

[@andrejrockshox]

if we have shadow mask and precise positions of blue red and green phosporus dots, how picture streching, skewing and rotationg works and even resolution change?

[@shaunhw]

Colour CRTs are not like LCD etc. panels, which can only illuminate a whole pixel. The three scanning electron beams can easily illuminate a portion of a single phospor dot (of its own colour) so general analogue picture geometry settings such as height, width, and incoming picture resolution are not affected by dot position. Indeed each scanning line of a picture might strike the same three phosphors more than once when building up an interlaced picture, or strike fractions of phosphot dots below and above the centre of the beam as it scans horizontally across the screen. The scanning lines are never aligned to the dot positions in any way at all. Unlike modern flat screens there is no "native" resolution at all. The same type of CRT could be used for 525 line scanning at 60 fields per second in the USA, as they could for 625 lines in Europe, and in the case of my country the UK , at the start of colour TV, they were run (by dual standard colour sets) at 625 lines on BBC2 (UHF bands) , and 405 lines for the legacy black and white channels (BBC1 and ITV, on VHF bands) before they were also simulcast in colour on UHF bands with 625 lines, with standards converters used for the remaining 405 line only black and white TV sets.

[@MrDuncl]

Technology Connections has done a whole video on this "These are not Pixels". p.s. In the dying days of CRTs when widescreen had become norm and ultra thin Plasma sets were available for £Thousands, Samsung made tubes in which the pixel pitch varied, depending on the position on the screen. Fine pitch in the centre where the action was most likely to be and a coarser pitch towards the edges. it allowed them to make the tubes a couple of inches shallower than other manufacturers.