High-speed video capture of CRT scanline

ditto to all the above.

awesome video, very educational! highly recommended for all of us that agonize over the details of displays in our games lol
 
Awesome, awesome video. I'll have to show that to my niece and nephew as they were born after CRT televisions had long been gone.
 
I'm always amazed at the guys that created and developed the CRT technology way back in the 1930's through the 1970's. I can't remember if the oscilloscope was developed before heavy development of the TV began or not, but the early signals they had no way of seeing with a test instrument, just had to take a guess and hope through trial and error it would work.
 
I've been watching the "Slow Mo Guy's" channel for a longgg time It's way better when you watch them pop balloons filled with water or tons of mouse traps on a trampoline than scan lines lol.
 
I'm always amazed at the guys that created and developed the CRT technology way back in the 1930's through the 1970's. I can't remember if the oscilloscope was developed before heavy development of the TV began or not, but the early signals they had no way of seeing with a test instrument, just had to take a guess and hope through trial and error it would work.
I often wonder along these lines too, how anyone came up with the idea blows my mind.

"hey, lets suck the air out of a glass bubble, paint it with phosphorous, shoot electrons at it and steer it with a magnet and see if it makes pictures"
 
A lot of the technology in a TV came from scientific research. The Crookes Tube was discovered in the late 1800's when a great deal of experimentation with physics/chemistry was going on.

Scientists discovered that if they went and evacuated the contents of the tube, a magic beam of particles would be created. They went and added the phosphors to the end of the tube based upon their knowledge at the time.

The Crookes Tube is actually how the electron was discovered. They were able to perform a bunch of experiments using it, and then the smart people figured out that you could alter the path of the electron beam with magnets.

So it wasn't all some guy at a bar one day going "Hmm, let me evacuate a glass tube, put some fancy electronics in there, and watch moving images". Heh. It started out as a science experiment which then kept getting repeatedly modified and modified until someone realized "Hey, we could get a moving image on this thing if we do A then B then C".

A HUGE amount of the technology that we love and appreciate today started out as simple experiments with regards to science. The technology then gets adapted nicely.
 
I often wonder along these lines too, how anyone came up with the idea blows my mind.

"hey, lets suck the air out of a glass bubble, paint it with phosphorous, shoot electrons at it and steer it with a magnet and see if it makes pictures"

Simple answer as to how...

Aliens1.jpg
 
It would be really cool if someone did this for a gun game to see what happens "during the flash".

It's not very exciting since it just paints the screen white, it all comes down to WHEN the sensors SEES the exact blob of white it's focused on thru that plastic lens during the draw you see slowed down in the video posted (it's dumb, it just picks up on the light which is basically a 1930s technology), then it can do the math and figure out where exactly you're aiming (or not aiming, if doing a point-away RELOAD such as Lethal Enforcers) and apply any offset formulated during the aiming calibration done when setting up the game (i.e. +10 pixels on X-axis). Nintendo does it differently and much less accurately. It strobes quickly with 'targets' of black blobs flashed in sequence and only knows if you're connecting with a target region, it never really knows exactly where you're pointing and doesn't care, only if you're a match for target 1, target 2, etc. It would be more exciting to see in slo-mo than the other method, though.

I know I answered an unasked question but I enjoy the subject matter.

We also see the TV's picture due to our human brain simplifying things through something called "persistence of vision" which allows this rolling blur of light to make sense to us, but animals supposedly see something much different.
 
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We also see the TV's picture due to our human brain simplifying things through something called "persistence of vision" which allows this rolling blur of light to make sense to us, but animals supposedly see something much different.

Yes and no. It is due to "persistence of vision", but that isn't something our brain is actively doing. It has to do with the refresh rate of the sensors in the back of our retina. Basically, it all depends on how quickly the chemical reaction induced by the photons can revert back once the photons are gone.

It's similar to the reason why when you stare at a two color, highly contrasted, image for a little bit, then look elsewhere, you still "see" that image but kind of messed up. The longer you stare at the same color, the more the rods and cones in our retinas get saturated. It then takes them a long time to get back to normal.
 
It's similar to the reason why when you stare at a two color, highly contrasted, image for a little bit, then look elsewhere, you still "see" that image but kind of messed up. The longer you stare at the same color, the more the rods and cones in our retinas get saturated. It then takes them a long time to get back to normal.

I've seen those LED light bars that look like blinking dots until you move your head or eyes around, then they spill into a simple shape or figure, despite coming from a simple row of lamps. Freaky stuff. Thanks for "fleshing" it out!
 
man there's some smart people out there. i'm just happy to stare at the screen and hammer my joystick. appreciate all the insight people have.
 
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It's not very exciting since it just paints the screen white, it all comes down to WHEN the sensors SEES the exact blob of white it's focused on thru that plastic lens during the draw you see slowed down in the video posted (it's dumb, it just picks up on the light which is basically a 1930s technology), then it can do the math and figure out where exactly you're aiming (or not aiming, if doing a point-away RELOAD such as Lethal Enforcers) and apply any offset formulated during the aiming calibration done when setting up the game (i.e. +10 pixels on X-axis). Nintendo does it differently and much less accurately. It strobes quickly with 'targets' of black blobs flashed in sequence and only knows if you're connecting with a target region, it never really knows exactly where you're pointing and doesn't care, only if you're a match for target 1, target 2, etc. It would be more exciting to see in slo-mo than the other method, though.

I know I answered an unasked question but I enjoy the subject matter.

We also see the TV's picture due to our human brain simplifying things through something called "persistence of vision" which allows this rolling blur of light to make sense to us, but animals supposedly see something much different.

I agree, slow move over line by line would be better for this. JP3 is giving me a little grief on target detection.
 
Thanks for sharing the video. Very nicely done video and good explanation of how different technologies work.

My only comment would be at 4:12 he erroneously referred to his TV as 4K when it's actually UHD (two different resolutions and standards - the resolution he quoted is UHD). Yes, a very small knit-pick, but one that bugs me (the same as TV manufacturers saying their TVs are "HD" when they can only manage 720P vs. 1080P).

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174221-no-tv-makers-4k-and-uhd-are-not-the-same-thing

Scott C.
 
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