Color TV Screen
A color TV screen differs from a black-and-white screen in three ways:
There are three electron beams that move simultaneously across the screen. They are named the red, green and blue beams.
The screen is not coated with a single sheet of phosphor as in a black-and-white TV. Instead, the screen is coated with red, green and blue phosphors arranged in dots or stripes. If you turn on your TV or computer monitor and look closely at the screen with a magnifying glass, you will be able to see the dots or stripes.
On the inside of the tube, very close to the phosphor coating, there is a thin metal screen called a shadow mask. This mask is perforated with very small holes that are aligned with the phosphor dots (or stripes) on the screen.
The following figure shows how the shadow mask works:
When a color TV needs to create a red dot, it fires the red beam at the red phosphor. Similarly for green and blue dots. To create a white dot, red, green and blue beams are fired simultaneously -- the three colors mix together to create white. To create a black dot, all three beams are turned off as they scan past the dot. All other colors on a TV
screen are combinations of red, green and blue.
Color TV Signal
A color TV signal starts off looking just like a black-and-white signal. An extra chrominance signal is added by superimposing a 3.579545 MHz sine wave onto the standard black-and-white signal. Right after the horizontal sync pulse, eight cycles of a 3.579545 MHz sine wave are added as a color burst.
Following these eight cycles, a
phase shift in the chrominance signal indicates the color to display. The amplitude of the signal determines the saturation. The following table shows you the relationship between color and phase:
ColorPhaseBurst0 degreesYellow15 degreesRed75 degreesMagenta135 degreesBlue195 degreesCyan255 degreesGreen315 degrees
A black-and-white TV filters out and ignores the chrominance signal. A color TV picks it out of the signal and decodes it, along with the normal intensity signal, to determine how to modulate the three color beams.