How does a television work?

Answer 1

rodents with small paint brushes live inside each television set, painting the scenes on the inside of the screen.

They receive instruction from signals they receive through the tin foil helmets their wear on the little heads.

Its a wonderful process. you should open the back of your television and watch it sometime.

Answer 2

It depends on what kind of TV you're talking about.

I figure you're probably talking about a "tube" (cathode ray tube) which basically fires a stream of electrons and uses a electromagnetic field to bend the electrons to hit the appropriate red, green, and blue screen pixels to make the color you want. Basically, it refreshes each pixel on the screen sequentially.

A LCD TV works like any other LCD screen in that there is a layer of electrons that are triggered by an electric field such that they will show through a layer of filters or not.

A plasma TV involves "phosphors excited by a gas". Don't know too much about this myself.

Answer 3

tv is television it means far vewing k when the elctricsity is passed in it its picturetube get on and it recives signal frm cable network and displays .k

Answer 4

you plug into the outlet on the wall.(ha)

Answer 5

magic and elves

Answer 6

Almost all 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 sometimes seen, but they are still rare when compared to CRTs. 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, because CRTs are the most common way of displaying images today.








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.


Phosphor
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 fluorescent color is really a phosphor -- fluorescent 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 electron beam strikes the phosphor, it makes the screen glow. In a black-and-white screen, there is one phosphor that glows 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.


In a cathode ray tube, the "cathode" is a heated filament (not unlike the filament in a normal light bulb). The heated filament 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 flies through the vacuum in the tube and hits the flat screen at the other end of the tube. This screen is coated with phosphor, which glows when struck by the beam.

As you can see in this drawing, there's not a whole lot to a basic 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 find that the tube is wrapped in coils of wires. The following pictures give you three different views of a typical set of steering coils:




(Note the large black electrode hooked to the tube near the screen -- it is connected internally to the conductive coating.)





The steering coils are simply copper windings (see How Electromagnets Work for details on coils). These coils are able to create magnetic fields inside the tube, and the electron beam responds to the fields. One set of coils creates a magnetic field 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.



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 flies back to the left side, moves down slightly and paints another horizontal line, and so on down the screen, like this:





In this figure, 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 flying 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 figure. When the beam is "painting," it is on, and when it is flying 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.

All 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 significantly reduces flicker.

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:

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
A signal that contains all three of these components 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 this:




The horizontal-retrace signals are 5-microsecond (abbreviated as "us" in the figure) 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.



Adding Color
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 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.
The following figure shows how the shadow mask works:





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:


Color 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 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.



Getting the Signal to You
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.

You are probably familiar with five different ways to get a signal into your TV set:

Broadcast programming received through an antenna
VCR or laser-disc content run from the VCR 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 first 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
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, like this:







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. 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.

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.



Digital TV
The latest buzz is digital TV, also known as DTV or HDTV (high-definition 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:

480p - 640x480 pixels progressive
720p - 1280x720 pixels progressive
1080i - 1920x1080 pixels interlaced
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
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!



Lots More Information!


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More Great Links!

Cable TV History
Why There's No Channel 1 on a TV
MPEG Pointers and Resources
Early Television Foundation - history of TV, with pictures
Scientific American: Television Addiction
Satellite TV

Satellite Plus: How Does DBS Work?
Orbit: About Satellite Television
Digital TV

Why are we converting to Digital TV?
Advanced Television Systems Committee - has all the detailed specs
Digital TV specifications
PBS: DTV FAQ
FCC: DTV FAQ
Plasma Displays

What types of flat-panel displays are available?
MonitorWorld.com
Plasma display
DuPont Microcircuit Materials: Flat Panel Displays
BeauReview: Plasma Displays
Remote Controls

Innotech Remote Controls
Decoding IR Remote Controls
A Serial Infrared Remote Controller