BORSCHT in POTS
It is now one week since Hurricane Sandy made landfall, and the area it affected is by no means back to normal. This post will discuss new and old media […] More
Watching Remote Baseball Games Before TV
Today, Joyce Kilmer is best known either for his poem “Trees” or for an eponymous service area on the New Jersey Turnpike. But he was also a journalist. In a […] More
IBC-ing the Future
This is what happened on Monday night, September 10, at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam: A crowd crammed into the large (1750-seat) auditorium to see the future–well, a […] More
The Light Fantastic
Here are some questions: Why is the man in the picture above holding radioactive sheets of music? What is the strange apparatus behind him? What does it have to do […] More
All You Can See
The equipment exhibitions at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) often seem to have themes. Two years ago, it was stereoscopic 3D. Before that, it was […] More
New Angles on 2D and 3D Images
Shooting stereoscopic 3D has involved many parameters: magnification, interaxial distance, toe-in angle (which can be zero), image-sensor-to-lens-axis shift, etc. To all of those, must we now also consider shutter angle […] More
The Alternatives
At next month’s SMPTE/NAB Technology Summit on Cinema in Las Vegas, one session will be devoted to “Alternative Content.” What’s that? It’s complicated. One hundred years ago, the 1912 […] More
Getting the Big Picture
When did theatrical television begin? Would you believe 1877? On March 29 of that year, someone using the pen name “Electrician” described a device called an “electroscope,” some sort […] More
What It Was Was Television
Did Thomas Edison predict television? According to some histories, the answer is yes, and the evidence is the image below, published on December 9, 1878 and captioned “Edison’s Telephonoscope […] More
Smellyvision and Associates
What is reality? And is it something we want to get closer to? Take a look at the picture of a cat above, as printed on a package of Bell Rock […] More