Submitted by Prof. ROWR

By Brian Roulston

Imagine yourself sitting in front of your TV watching your favourite program with a bowl of popcorn. Have you ever wondered how the amazing colors and images you see on your television screen get there? It’s easy to just think of it as hocus pocus, but the truth is, it’s all about tiny pieces of science working together.

Think of your television screen as a giant canvas, but instead of paint, it’s covered in millions of tiny lights. Each one of those lights is called a pixel, and it’s the smallest point of light on your screen. When you see a high-definition picture, you’re looking at millions and millions of these pixels all working together.

But how do these tiny lights create every color in the rainbow? The secret is that each pixel isn’t just one light; it’s made of three even smaller lights called sub-pixels. These three sub-pixels work as a team, and their colors are always the same: red, green, and blue. You might remember from art class that mixing red, blue, and yellow paint can make other colors. But when it comes to light, the rules are very different. Mixing red, green, and blue light is called “additive color.” When you mix them all together at full brightness, you get bright white light.

This is the magic behind your TV! To make a bright yellow flower, your TV has a tiny computer built into it which turns on the red and green sub-pixels inside the pixel but leaves the blue one off. To make a rich purple sunset, the red and blue lights turn on while the green one stays off. This tiny computer inside your TV can also change the brightness of each of these tiny lights, so it can create thousands of different colors and shades.

When you go to the store to buy a new tv you are inundated with terms like SD, HD, UHD or 4K. Those terms are about the number of tiny pixels, those tiny dots of light that are painting the picture on your screen. The more pixels you have, the sharper and more detailed the image looks. Standard Definition (SD) is like an older painting with only a few dots; it has around 720 x 480 pixels, which is why it can look a bit blurry.

Standard Definition television first appeared in the early 1940s and for many years, through the 1940s to the 1960s, these were mostly black-and-white TVs. You can ask your grandparents, and many of our senior readers will remember these black and white televisions. Televisions were much simpler in those days, and their pixels could only show different shades of gray, from the brightest white to the deepest black. Color TVs started to become popular in the 1960s and early 1970s, they were still Standard Definition. This type of Standard Definition TV, whether black-and-white or color, was the main kind of television people watched until the mid-1990s, before newer, clearer TVs started to become available.

The very first experimental television broadcast in Canadian history began in 1932 in Montreal, Quebec, under the call sign VE9EC. However, regular, official television broadcasting in Canada by the CBC in both French and English began with the sign-on of the nation’s first television stations in Montreal and Toronto in 1952. ‘Aladdin and his Lamp,’ featuring Patricia Medina and John Sands, was aired on CBC TV in Montreal on September 6, 1952. Just to clarify, this was not a Walt Disney movie but rather a 1952 film produced by Monogram Productions, Inc.

The world of television really changed with High Definition (HD), which has two million pixels, making it a huge leap in clarity. This is the standard now for most modern televisions today. The first High-Def broadcast in Canada took place on November 22, 2003, when CBC Sports broadcast the Heritage Classic, an outdoor NHL game, nationwide. The Montreal Canadiens won that game, defeating the Edmonton Oilers by a score of 4-3, in this landmark event held at Commonwealth Stadium.

Now, for the newest televisions, we have Ultra High Definition (UHD), or 4K. A 4K TV packs in a whopping eight million pixels—that’s four times as many as an HD TV! This creates an incredibly sharp and realistic picture, especially on a large screen. The Sports Network (TSN) is credited with broadcasting the first live 4K Ultra HD game in Canada and North America on January 20, 2016, when they aired a basketball game between the Toronto Raptors and the Boston Celtics, with Toronto defeating Boston 115 to 109.

The next step is 8K, which is the future of television. An 8K TV has a staggering 33 million pixels, this technology is still very new. The difference between 4K and 8K can be hard to spot for most people unless the screen is huge and you’re sitting really close. It shows us how far television technology has come.

It might surprise you to know that 16K televisions already exist! Numerous manufacturers worldwide have produced these displays, featuring impressive screen sizes of 110 inches or larger.

ROWR! That’s The Science Behind It!

(ROWR is pronounced ROAR! A nod to the Hamilton Ti Cats. Ed)