subscribe

Braun Tube

braun tube

The development of the first CRT was the culmination of many years, or in this case, centuries, of research and discovery which put into place all the necessary elements. These include: the first manmade phosphor (1603); the first gas discharge tube (1751); the first production of light by exciting a phosphor with an electrical discharge … Read more

Bi/Tri-Linear Filtering

without bi

A simple form of texture filtering, point sampling, could be used to scale textures prior to their being mapped onto surfaces in a 3D scene. This technique could easily introduce errors by taking a too simple approach to the task. Using a more sophisticated, though slower, technique called “bi-linear filtering”, the colour of each pixel … Read more

Beam-Focusing

beam focusing

There are parts of the CRT that control the production, flow, acceleration and direction of the tube’s electron beam but leave its shape unaltered.  As the electrons accelerate towards the screen, they tend to diverge, as they all have a similar negative charge. If this divergence were to continue, the beam’s diameter when it reached … Read more

Aperture Grille

aperture grille

Before the three-gun, shadow mask CRT was firmly established as a standard for producing colour CRTs, several other novel systems were developed. One of these was the PDF (Post Deflection Focusing) Chromatron developed at the University of California. This tube had a single electron gun addressing a pattern of continuous vertical phosphor stripes on its … Read more

Antialiasing

antialiasing

Antialiasing, as the name suggests, is a technique used to combat an effect known as aliasing. When a line is drawn on a piece of paper, its edges appear smooth regardless of the line’s orientation. When a line is drawn on a computer display, whether CRT- or LCD-based, the limited resolution of the display means … Read more

Anode

anode

The control grid regulates the number of electrons which are allowed to leave the gun of a CRT by using a negative voltage to repel the electrons. Once free of the control grid’s influence, the electrons then need to be accelerated down the tube to ensure that they strike the phosphor face-plate lining with sufficient … Read more

Anistropic Filtering

Anisotropic means “non-uniform shape” and it is because this filtering technique works on non-uniform, or uneven, shaped areas that it is more powerful, and takes much more processing power, than Point Sampling, bi-linear or tri-linear filtering. One of the problems with these methods is that they rely on a square as their sampling area and … Read more

Alpha-Blending

alphablending

Alpha-blending is a technique which can be used when computer graphics are laid on top of each other and one or more of the objects contain a transparent, or semi-transparent, portion. It ensures that the pixels of the graphic which are underneath a transparent area are visible through it and that their colour or brightness … Read more

EMEA Monitor Market continues recovery in Q1 2010

Meko’s latest data indicates that the Q1 2010 desktop monitor (DTM) market continued to build on its recovery after the recession. Analysis by the displays specialist shows that the market grew by 9% YoY to over 11.5 million units in EMEA during the quarter.   This improved performance in DTMs builds on the YoY increase … Read more

Wishy washy coalitions?

There has been a lot going on around us. In the UK, we had an election that resulted in a ‘hung parliament’, with no single party having a clear majority. After a few days of negotiating and power-broking, we now have a formal coalition government for the first time in 65 years. In the past, … Read more

ALiS

ALis

Developed by Fujitsu as an improvement to the Three Electrode Surface Discharge method of driving a PDP, which it invented in 1984, ALiS (Alternate Lighting of Surfaces) displays are not made up of enclosed pixel elements with the display electrodes fixed to both top and bottom substrates, as are conventional side discharge PDPs. Instead, the … Read more

Active matrix (AM/TFT)

active matrix

In Super Twisted Nematic LCs, we see how multiplexed addressing allows an array of pixels to be controlled in such a way as to allow a high definition display to be built with liquid crystals. The method used to switch individual pixels in multiplexed displays, called passive matrix addressing, has many drawbacks, such as: Current … Read more