WHAT COMES AFTER HIGH-DEF
4-K!
Courtesy GESDA
UAV readers have been flooded with so much news lately about the transition to FIDTV- with respect to both the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war. and this country's transition to digital TV broadcast - that I almost feel bad bringing this one up. But it's true- in late October Warner Bros. began field trials of digital cinema presentations in Japan featuring so-called 4K resolution, which is, gulp, an image with a pixel count of 4096x2160.
Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and one of its subsidiaries will collaborate with Warner on the year long trial and will provide the fiber-optic links between Warner's facilities in the US and digital cinema distribution centers in Japan. The opening film was Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, and other high profile films such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are expected to be included in the trial as well.
Initial testing will use a JVC professional 4K D-ILA projector, and later demonstrations will use Sony's 10,000 lumen, 4096x2 160 SXRD projector. The demonstrations will be branded to moviegoers as "4K Pure Cinema" Movie studios are anxious to see digital cinema in the marketplace as it would slash their distribution costs dramatically, and offer more flexibility to multiplexes screening multiple copies of films. Theater owners have been slow to react due to the substantial cost in outfitting their theaters with digital projection systems.
THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN CHANGE
BY KEITH KNOS, CET/EHF
(Editor's Note: Mr. Knos passed away shortly after writing this last article for the (Kansas Electronics Association) KEA Notess after a lifetime of service and dedication to the electronics industry)
After World War 1, with its advances in technology, radio broadcasting came into being. The radios of the day were Tuned Radio Frequency (TRF) receivers.
If you think you have had trouble showing people how to program a VCR you should have been around to teach how to use a TRF receiver. On many radios there were 3 tuning knobs with numbers from 1 to 100. There could be 2 volume control knobs and on some there was a regenerative control.
To tune a station, you first had to decide about where it would be on the dials. All dials were set to the same number and you listened to see if you were receiving a station, if you were, you set the first knob for maximum volume, went to the second knob and set it and then to the third. You listened until the station identified itself and then recorded your numbers in a log so you could get the station again when you wished.
Most radios of the day used type O1A tubes; the filament was the cathode of the tube so it had to be heated with direct current. Volume was determined by how hot the filaments were heated. On local stations there was enough output for a loudspeaker (as it was called then) but many used headphones.
All of this required a long wire antenna strung as high as possible outdoors and a good ground. There were A (for filament power), B (for B+ plate power) and C (for bias) batteries.
(Continued on page 7)
