Originally published at: A Cathode ray tube TV's light beam captured at 380,117 frames per second | Boing Boing
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Perhaps you are referring to the raster rate? You are not going to capture the speed of light on any 4k camera.
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The part showing the indovidual sub-pixels dimming and brightening made me think I could train myself to write RGB codes by hand. There’s got to be some kind of contest where nerds do that, right?
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Some days, I kinda miss the beautiful muddiness that the CRT provided, which the (best) pixel artists used to their advantage. There’s a lot to be said for working within limits, and using those limits to formulate your art.
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In his book, The Responsive Chord (first published in 1973) author Tony Schwartz makes the argument that watching TV (cathode ray in particular) is more akin to listening to radio than observing film because (regardless of the speed of the cathode scan) our brains are still involved in the processing of not only the illusion of a moving image (persistence of vision) but also the illusion of the image itself (in sound we don’t hear words, we process the timeline of received sound and construct the words and their meaning in our minds) so even if the screen displays a still image it is still ‘moving’ - which is part of why television screens were always so entrancing despite conveying wretched content. There’s a lot more than all that in this wonderful book and it is well worth the read. The Responsive Chord | Tony Schwartz
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Many years ago some researchers, with tongue in cheek, said they had exceeded the speed of light, on the face of a CRT. The CRT was large enough, and the scan rate fast enough, that the electron beam moved across the tube faster than c. But of course the individual electrons weren’t moving that fast, but only appeared to.
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Reminds me of that scene at the end of Over the Hedge, with Hammy and the laser beam…
But seriously, I never thought I’d see a movie of a CRT raster scan. Amazing!
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Reminds me of one of my favorite microcomputer hacks.
Read the memory addresses that say what bit of video RAM is currently being painted on the screen and rewrite the color pallet as it went, so you could get way more colors in an image than the computer notionally supported.
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Remember when computers had a “background color” where you could make the letterbox overscan area be something other than black? On the commodore 64 you could write machine language to change the background color many times per frame, to get horizontal stripes, outside the addressable pixels. Oh for the days when we owned our computers.
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I remember that. They did something similar on the Apple IIGS, where the background and border color could be specified separately. Some folks would follow the scanline and change the border color to get cascading rainbow stripes in the border or similar.
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Pedantic note: there are no “pixels” on a CRT monitor.
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