This article gives a nice overview of the technological challenges that had to be overcome to make HDTV commercially viable. At the time this article was written there wasn’t even a tape drive that could support the bandwidth needed for a digital HDTV stream. Not to mention the hardware needed to encrypt all that digital content in real-time to comply with HDCP.
We did get our HDTV, though not in the 1980’s as the article predicts.
High-Resolution TV
- here come wide-screen crystal-clear pictures
New video components speed TV systems that match 35-mm-film fidelity
By JOHN FREE
Washington, D.C.
For several days, groups of government officials, politicians, and journalists crowded into a darkened room at CBS’s offices here. We’d come to view a rare, one-time collection of video gear. “What we are going to show you,” CBS’s Joseph Flaherty, vice-president of engineering development, told my group, “is a combination of high-resolution TV, stereo sound, wide-screen TV, and enhanced-color TV.”
During the next hour I watched a variety of amazing TV images that had extraordinary clarity—more than five times the detail of television pictures you see on conventional home receivers. The high-resolution pictures, a dazzling match for sharp-focus 35-mm slides, were shown on special “Cinerama-type” direct-view sets and a large-screen projection TV. Other equipment used by CBS, such as microelectronic encoding circuits and a Sony-built digital video recorder, may have a key role—in improved forms—in delivering this new type of TV to you during the 1980’s.
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Wow, the entertainment industry used to have a much more enlightened approach to “hackers”:
While passing through the earphone stage, television needs what radio needed in the days of crystal sets—hams and tinkerers. RCA recently made available to amateurs certain specialized parts, including several Kinescopes, and before long complete television kits containing all the parts for receivers may be available. Once the art emerges from the laboratory, the nation’s hams and tinkerers will play an important part in its development.
Where is Television Now?
TEN years ago a woman sat under blinding lights in John L. Baird’s television studio in London while a group of men, assembled around a receiver in Hartsdale, N. Y., saw her face on a screen.
That radio transmission of a moving picture across 3,000 miles of ocean led many to believe that television, a new Twentieth-century wonder, was about to round the corner and, like radio, enter most American homes. But years passed and nothing of this sort happened. People still are asking, “When will we have television?”
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I love the box on the second page listing all of the licensed TV stations in the U.S. All 25 of them.
Giant Television Images
By H. WINFIELD SECOR
ULYSSES A. SANABRIA is one of the foremost geniuses in Television today. Mr. Sanabria is only 24 years of age, yet this youthful electrical wizard has demonstrated to the engineering fraternity and to the press, the largest television images thus far shown. The author was present at the New York demonstration when television images six and one-half feet square were exhibited and they were surprisingly clear. At the New York Radio Show, television images 10 by 14 ft., have been promised by Sanabria. The following description of the Sanabria system for producing these gigantic television images is authentic and was obtained in a recent interview with Mr. Sanabria.
AT the Radio Trade Show held in Chicago last spring, and also at a recent demonstration given to engineers and members of the press in New York City, Ulysses A. Sanabria startled his audience by showing surprisingly clear television images six and one-half feet square. Many of those present took advantage of the inventor’s invitation to stand in front of the television pickup, and thus have the images of their faces projected on the glass exhibition screen, much to the enjoyment of their friends. Considerable merriment was caused when some of the wittier ones, who posed in front of the photo-cells, made a few remarks which were picked up by a microphone and sent through an amplifier to a loud speaker below the glass screen on which the moving images of the speaker appeared.
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