For You Video Geeks: Home-made field-sequential color TVIf you're the type of person who frequents your local SMPTE chapter meetings, have we got some pictures and stories for you!
Fellow SMPTE member Derek Flickinger shows off a field sequential color TV that one of the Philadelphia-area members built to celebrate the history of broadcast TV. (And what a celebration!)
Derek writes:
I was amazed at how much innovation and technology came out of the Philadelphia area. Many of those instrumental engineers presented some great stories.
The 1440 RPM spinning color wheel is synched to the video stream via a servo, although it slowly drifts a little over time (for broadcast, it was synced to the spinning color wheel in the original color TV cameras).
He spent countless hours experimenting with the colored gels to get the most accurate color rendering possible. The color actually is better than a current broadcast color signal, mostly because the color gamut is a lot wider and it does not have to suffer from the downgraded color resolution of our current NTSC video signals.
It also is interesting that the color coding sequence was Red, Blue, and Green (RBG) because there was less of a voltage differential between the three color levels for the old and original Orthicon color camera tubes to handle. \
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