Mechanical television

[yagosaga]

Hello,

Originally Posted by Sandy G

The scanning disc system wasn't all THAT shabby-IIRC, the used a variant of it on the moon for the 1st couple of manned landings.

The tv camera on the moon was a tube-based b/w camera with a color wheel like the CBS color system of the 1950's. This was the most reliable color tv system under space conditions (with appr. 10 frames per second).

Today, DLP Video projectors even use a color wheel, see:

http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/...chnology2.html

Originally Posted by Eric H

Would it be possible/practical to build a higher-def mechanical TV, say 500 lines or so?

The limit was reached with 441 lines in the 1930's. Even in the time when picture tubes and iconoscopes were common, mechanical film scanner with 441 lines were used. Gerhard Bauer has held a lecture about a 441 line mechanical scanner "for people, film and slides" used in German television from 1938 to 1945 on the ETF convention in 2005.

I hope that I sometimes can update my Nipkow disk monitor with color. But the color NBTV standard is still in discussion and PCBs are not available for now.

BTW: Steve McVoy is building a color mirror screw monitor:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/color_mirror_screw.html

It is an awesome project, I check the news webpage of the ETF every day for updates.

This might indicate a slowly growing interest in mechanical television.

Eckhard