Randy Hoffner

Cable is frequently worse than broadcast for loud commercials and uneven commercial loudness. The worst, of course, is commercially-supported online TV.

Although there is little equipment supporting it available, the interest in 1080p/60 as a future scanning format has been high enough to result in a SMPTE standard for an interface to accommodate it.

4:4:4, 4:2:2, 4:2:0 -- what do these numbers mean, and where did they come from?

When we looked at color and color mixing, one of the things we examined was the fact that when red, green and blue lights are mixed in equal proportions, the result is neutral gray light.

"How did 48 kHz emerge as the professional digital audio sample rate?" As we will see, television had a great influence on this number.

Although aspect ratio has always been a factor in television, for many decades only one aspect ratio was available: 4:3. With apologies to accomplished punsters, that picture has changed.

As we celebrate TV Technology's 20th anniversary, it seems the perfect time to take a look back over our collective shoulders and see just how far television technology has come in the past 20 years.

Way back in 1990, the International Telecommu-nications Union's CCIR, or International Radio Consultative Committee, got a jump on audio for HDTV.