Gadgetory

the word pixel comes from the words picture element and today's video is all about the history of the pixel it begins all the way back in 1839 when the first practical commercially available process of photography was introduced it was called the daguerreotype and it involves all of this stuff but photography only continued to improve from there and soon the daguerreotype was obsolete photography was pretty much black-and-white until the first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 by a man named James Clerk Maxwell what he did was capture three black-and-white images each through a different filter red blue and green by projecting each of these images back through their respective colored filters and onto a screen the final colored image was able to be reconstructed and here it is it's a tartan ribbon tartan is also what spell check always tries to change my name to anyway this process of capturing just the primary colors of red green and blue light works so well that we still use it to this day because red green and blue are primary additive colors you can mix them together in different proportions to achieve any color you like continuing along the timeline in 1926 a man named John Logie Baird demonstrated the first televised moving images using a mechanical television set that used a rapidly rotating nib qov scanning disk it was grayscale and limited to 12.5 frames a second and just thirty lines of resolution but it was very impressive for the time notice how we're measuring the resolution in lines not pixels pixels hadn't been invented yet but we're getting closer later in 1927 filo T Farnsworth demonstrated the completely electronic cathode ray tube television set the CRT was definitely superior to the mechanical television sets especially since it had no moving parts here's how it works you've got a sealed glass tube with a vacuum inside at one end you've got an electron gun which is exactly what it sounds like this gun shoots out a varied stream of electrons which are then steered by the magnets such that they land upon the phosphoric covered screen at the the end of the tube forming a picture and it's done so quickly that you can't even see it happening color television was first introduced in the 1950s and they worked in a very similar way instead of just one electron gun now you had three one for each of the primary colors of red green and blue the beams would hit an array of colored phosphorus called triads these triads are still not quite pixels the color TV standard at the time was five hundred and twelve distinct horizontal lines it wasn't until the digital age that those video lines were further sliced into rectangles which made digital representation of an image possible and thus the pixel was finally born today pixels come in a variety of shapes and sizes on a variety of screens like plasma Oh le d-- and LCD displays which have rendered CRTs mostly obsolete pixels have continued to get smaller and smaller with better frame rates and better color depth we've already made videos about all these topics which you can check out right over here if you want to watch even more high-quality educational content than good news today's video sponsor is lynda.com Lynda offers high quality totally comprehensive video tutorials on a wide variety of subjects like photography video production programming animation 3d it's a long list they have thousands of video courses with instructors who are industry experts lynda.com has been my go-to source for learning difficult software for the past six years lynda.com videos can be watched on your computer tablet or mobile device access to all of their tutorials starts at $25 a month but for you guys if you go to lynda.com slash tech squicky you can get a free 7 day trial and you can see for yourself exactly what they have to offer thanks for watching this episode of fast as possible give us a like or a dislike share subscribe leave a comment do all that YouTube stuff and we'll see you next time