Looking Ahead/News Briefs
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Schemes for transmitting newspapers via airwaves and cable had already been around for a couple decades by the time this piece appeared in a 1968 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine. Large publishers like the New York Times, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, etc., wanted the ability to sell subscriptions to entities and individuals who desired time-sensitive information even more quickly than an overnight airline flight could provide a hard copy. The vision would ultimately need to wait for the advent of the Internet before widespread, affordable service would be available - primarily because the original vision of producing hard copies of entire newspapers at remote locations was (and still is) impractical. Color television was overtaking B&W as being dominant in households, and a lot of effort went into improving picture quality. A big problem was inconsistent hue and brightness between sets, even those of the same make and model. The IEEE and others convened committees to investigate and remedy the issue. Analog signals complicated the problems, but even today's LED and LCD displays show a huge variation between monitors even though the digital input signals are exactly the same. A decade later, we're still not there. Looking Ahead/News Briefs - Looking Ahead
Newspapers may soon be added to the services presented on CATV systems. By David Lachenbruch, Contributing Editor TV Newspaper Readout Newspapers may soon be added to the services presented on CATV systems. UMC Facsimile Corp., controlled by Universal Marion Corp., is testing via cable TV a system which it claims can transmit a full-size newspaper page per minute on a standard FM station's subcarrier - or faster if a full FM channel is used at night while the station is off the air. Its "variable velocity scanning" system saves time and bandwidth by eliminating redundancies in the transmitted signal. Portions of the newspaper page - such as the white spaces around the type - which do not contain printed information are processed at a rate much faster than information-containing portions. Under UMC's plan, a large metropolitan newspaper would be transmitted by FM subcarrier and stored on a standard reel of magnetic audio tape for later playback at 7 ips on a vacant CATV channel. A more elaborate system would employ the tape recorder-player in the viewer's home. "Playing" the newspaper index first, the viewer would decide which pages he wanted to read on his TV screen, then use the fast-forward button to locate them. At night, the tape would be erased automatically and the next morning's paper recorded. Meanwhile, a new data conversion technique is being used by Bell Labs to transmit newspaper page facsimiles over telephone lines (photo). In experiments a page has been transmitted in 6 minutes. Each page is attached to the drum of a revolving facsimile scanner. Scanner signals are fed into a data conversion terminal for conversion to binary pulse. These encoded pulses are then transmitted over T−1 carrier telephone line at rates of 1.5 million bits per second. Off-Color TV A multifaceted, full-scale engineering investigation is now under way in an attempt to remedy the major weakness of American color TV - those annoying variations of color intensity and hue from station to station, camera to camera, scene to scene and program to program. The study will examine the role played in color changes by station equipment, maintenance, film processing, broadcast standards, measurement techniques, receiver design, servicing, antennas - to cite just a part of the inquiry's scope. The end result could be new instrumentation, equipment, procedures - or even FCC standards. The inquiry is being conducted by an ad hoc engineering committee composed of representatives of virtually every organization with an interest in television: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Electronic Industries Association, National Association of Broadcasters and National Community Television Association, with the FCC represented on an "observer" basis. Fast-Growing CATV Television-by-cable mayor may not be the wave of the future - but at present it's growing faster than ever. An analysis of CATV's growth last year shows that the number of systems increased by nearly 15% to 1984, while the number of homes served by cable rose 26% to 2,675,251 - that's 4.7% of all US television-equipped homes, an increase of 3.9% in one year. Wyoming is the state with the greatest CATV saturation - 28.5% of all homes get their programs by cable. Vermont and Montana are next, with 27% and 23.8%, respectively. Importance of Imports While the demand for black-and-white TV sets continues to be surprisingly strong in the "color age" (sales were up 2.5% from last year in the first half of 1968), a sharply rising percentage is now foreign-made. Predictions are being heard that monochrome TV will follow the transistor radio in becoming largely an import market with the vast majority of receivers being manufactured outside the U.S. In the first half of this year, more than 25% of all monochrome TV sets sold in the United States were made overseas. Most of these imported sets, however, bore American set makers' brand names - either built to their specs by outside firms or, in some cases, made in their own plants in the Far East. The vast majority of imported TV sets still come from Japan - the source of 557,298 receivers in the first 6 months of 1968. At the same time, 53,403 came in from Taiwan (Formosa) and a couple of hundred from Hong Kong. Aside from Canada, no other country ships any quantity of TV sets to the United States. Imported black-and-white sets, while still largely in the small-screen area, are gradually increasing in size. The 12" receiver is gaining in popularity, while the novelty-sized tinyvision sets are declining. Technician Test The National Electronic Association reports a 50% failure rate for its new electronic technician certification test (see News Briefs, September). The test was written by technician members of NEA, and covers electronic theory and. practical troubleshooting. Supermagnets New permanent-magnet materials with very high resistance to demagnetization make it possible to cast extremely small magnets in shapes different from conventional magnets. Solid cobalt, copper, iron and a rare earth element - either cerium or samarium - are placed in disc-shaped molds in a copper hearth and fused by an arc furnace. Coercive forces as high as 28,700 oersteds have been obtained in Bell Labs magnets.
Posted August 2, 2023 |
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