Introduction to SNG and ENG Microwave

The TV picture

When you sit in your living room, watching TV, have you ever wondered how the picture is made up? If you are reading this book, the answer is probably ‘yes’.

How can we send a moving picture down a cable or over the air? Well, we have to break it up into pieces. Think of each picture you see on the screen at any one instant as a frame – like a single slide in a slide show – and TV is just a very fast slide show. Within each frame of the TV picture, there are areas of different brightness (luminance) and colour (chrominance). We call the smallest perceptible block of picture a ‘pixel’ (an abbreviation of picture element).

Now we need to know which parts of the picture are bright and which bits are particular colours. So we divide ...