WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This little CRT video monitor from JVC is
no ordinary thing.

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While it may look like an unassuming, and
quite dainty, professional video product,

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it’s actually quite remarkable.

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If you know a thing or two about color CRT televisions
and monitors, you might be a little surprised

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when you get up close and personal with it.

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See, you won’t find any phosphor dots or
stripes on this display.

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Nu-uh.

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That’s because this monitor is actually
black and white.

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Let me show you.

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If I do a little… unauthorized disassembly,
you’ll find the face of the picture tube

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staring at you clear as day.

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If I pump some video into it you’ll discover
the picture tube is in fact

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a black and white picture tube.

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We can see the video scan-lines created as
the electron beam sweeps across the tube

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clear as day.
(yes, the same expression was used twice. Deal with it.)

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And, of course, everything looks either black,
white, or some sort of grey in between.

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But, just by placing this little cover in
front of the CRT, it becomes a color image.

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And a pretty good one, too.

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This is some freaky stuff man!

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Color,

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black and white,

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color,

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black and white!

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I could do this all day… but instead let’s
explain what’s going on here.

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This monitor is using a technology which JVC
liked to call LCCS, for

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Liquid Crystal Color Shutter.

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See, this cover isn’t just there for style
points.

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In fact, it creates the color image in conjunction
with the picture tube.

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You might be familiar with the active shutter technology 
used in some 3D glasses.

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These glasses have liquid crystal shutters in each eye

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which alternately block your left eye and then your right from seeing what's in front of you.

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If you coordinate that with
a high-refresh rate display that can switch

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back and forth in tandem with the glasses,
then you’ll see a stereoscopic image.

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This shutter, though, is a little different.

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Rather than blocking all light, it can select
between three color filters to tint the image

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either red, green, or blue.

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If it does that fast enough, you won’t be
able to notice.

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And, so long as the color-switching is carefully
coordinated with what the CRT is doing, you

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can create a color image by first drawing
a red image,

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then a green one, and then a blue one.

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So long as the color shutter can match itself
up with the sequential images from the CRT,

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it will appear as a full-color image.

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Now aside from just being… well nifty, this
little bit of tech has some surprising similarities

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both to a modern technology and a much, much
older technology pushed by CBS.

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Let’s start with the newer tech, first.

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DLP projectors (and not long ago, televisions)
typically use a very similar system to create

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a color image.

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See, on its own, DLP technology

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(which stands for Digital Light Processing)

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can’t produce color.

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DLP works by shining a bright light source
onto a DLP chip,

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known as a Digital Micro-mirror Device, or DMD.

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Microscopic mirrors on its surface can reflect
light in either one direction or another as

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a voltage applied to them causes them to pivot.

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In practice these mirrors become pixels, and
if you want the pixel to be white, you align

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the mirror so that if reflects light from
the light source out through the lens and

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onto the screen.

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If you want the pixel to be black, you tilt
the mirror the other way, and light is instead

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reflected onto a black surface inside the
projector which absorbs that light.

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Although the mirrors have only a binary state,
either on or off, you can create shades of

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grey by dithering them, or moving them back
and forth really really quickly.

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But, you may have noticed, that there’s
no color component here.

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Very expensive DLP projectors, like those
used in cinemas, will have three DLP chips,

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one for each color component of the RGB space,
but most consumer models will use one DLP chip,

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and place a color wheel in between the
lens and the chip.

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The color wheel is made of sections of dichroic
glass and can produce extremely pure red,

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green, and blue light.

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Sometimes there’s a white section, too,
to increase overall image brightness.

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When the projector (or rear-projection television)
is operating, the color wheel spins very quickly

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to color the output from the DLP chip red,
green, and blue over and over again.

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And, since the DLP chip is wicked fast, you
can create a full color image simply by drawing

00:04:01.200 --> 00:04:03.540
three monochrome images in sequence,

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so long as you do it fast enough for persistence of vision to kick in.

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This is what causes the rainbow effect you
may have seen when looking at a projection

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screen or certain televisions.

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When you move your eyes quickly, you’ll
see that bright objects break apart into a

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streak of red green and blue.

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This is particularly noticeable during credits
sequences.

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The only way to prevent this is to use three
DLP chips together, and since that’s pretty

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expensive, you’ll see the rainbow effect
fairly frequently.

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And, to make the matter even more complex,
some people are more sensitive to it than

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others, and in fact some people may never
notice it at all.

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It may not surprise you, then, that the rainbow
effect is in fact visible on this little television.

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I don’t know if I’ll be able to replicate
this on camera well enough, but hopefully I can.

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What I know I can do is take a slow motion
shot of this screen with my phone.

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Now, fair warning, this is extremely flickery,
so if that sort of thing may cause problems

00:04:56.550 --> 00:04:59.860
for you, please look away until I say “persnickety”

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I don’t *yet* have a high-speed camera which
can capture this at a higher frame rate,

00:05:04.240 --> 00:05:06.780
but you can at least tell that the entire screen

00:05:06.780 --> 00:05:10.000
is being colored red, green, and blue, in rapid succession.

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Unfortunately, the nature of the camera’s
rolling shutter,

00:05:13.060 --> 00:05:16.940
combined with the way CRTs are scanned, makes this kind of…

00:05:16.940 --> 00:05:19.610
suck but I think you get the idea.

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In fact, keen eyes may notice that the color
shutter is actually in three sections so it

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can follow the path of the electron beam as
it scans the tube.

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Persnickety.

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Now let’s talk about that CBS thing I mentioned
before.

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I’ve covered this in some earlier videos
of mine, so I’ll be brief, but in the early

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days of color television, there were two competing
systems.

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CBS wanted to use conventional black and white
picture tubes that would be scanned three

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times in rapid succession, and a spinning
color wheel would sit in front of the tube.

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Really, it’s just a scaled-up version of
the color wheel in a DLP projector.

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Their system worked really well, and was a
pretty cheap way to make color television work.

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But, while building color television sets
(and even cameras) like this would be very

00:06:02.440 --> 00:06:08.129
easy, this new color television signal would
be entirely incompatible with the existing

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black-and-white signals, and thus existing
black-and-white television sets.

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RCA managed to win this fight by fudging the
black and white signal and merging a color

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signal into it using weird math and stuff,
thereby creating what they called "compatible color".

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These televisions required entirely new picture
tube technology, and the cameras were literally

00:06:27.840 --> 00:06:32.910
three cameras in one, but since these new
color signals could still be received by black

00:06:32.910 --> 00:06:35.979
and white televisions, it made the transition
seamless.

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So, in a weird way, this monitor is harkening
back to the days of the color television wars.

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It’s using a more modern equivalent of the
CBS color wheel system, but it’s the exact

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same principle.

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Now, you may have realized that in order to
do this, the television has to do some interesting

00:06:51.910 --> 00:06:53.770
processing wizardry.

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It has to take normal NTSC or PAL analog video signals,
and break them up into three distinct images,

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then draw them sequentially.

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It can’t just draw them at the same time
with three separate electron beams,

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like all other televisions do.

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And that probably explains why this technology didn’t appear in televisions

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until the year 2000, when this was released.

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It was some pretty expensive stuff.

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Not the actual picture tube or even the color
shutter, mind you, but the electronics required

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to turn a normal television signal into a
sequentially-drawn image.

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In fact this itty-bitty monitor sold
for about $1,200.

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Yikes!

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But, it did have some serious advantages.

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I’ve shown you this little television before,
it uses conventional dot-mask CRT technology.

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The image on the LCCS monitor is night-and-day
better.

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Small, color CRTs tend to just… not be very
good, so using a black-and-white tube and

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a liquid crystal color shutter provided a
significant improvement.

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But the real selling point for this tech was
that the screen was much easier to see in

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bright conditions.

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The color shutter improved contrast quite
a bit, so one potential use for this monitor

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would be on-location shoots for things like
newscasts or even movie production.

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Bright light around the screen wouldn’t
make it difficult to see,

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in fact it's claimed it could be seen in direct sunlight.

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That said, there are some disadvantages, too.

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The color is just…

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OK.

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It seemed fairly washed out to me, and I needed
to turn the chroma adjustment up pretty high

00:08:23.090 --> 00:08:26.180
to get what I’d call “normal” colors.

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I’m guessing this is simply due to the fact
that the liquid crystal color shutter can’t

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produce quite as pure of a red, green, or
blue as dedicated phosphor formulations can.

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Colors also shift with differing viewing angles,
and uniform images reveal the structure of

00:08:40.960 --> 00:08:46.300
the LC shutter itself, imparting faint horizontal
lines at the borders between each section.

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And perhaps most importantly, scaling this
tech up into larger screens would require

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large color shutters, and who knows how practical
that might have been.

00:08:56.610 --> 00:09:01.100
Now I’m sure some of you have been screaming
this at your screens for some time now, and

00:09:01.100 --> 00:09:05.970
in fact some of you are probably already writing furious comments about this, so here goes.

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It was not JVC who developed this technology.

00:09:09.970 --> 00:09:14.770
It was the oscilloscope manufacturer Tektronix
who came up with it, in fact they patented

00:09:14.770 --> 00:09:16.780
it in 1983.

00:09:16.780 --> 00:09:18.260
Giving it the name NuColor,

00:09:18.260 --> 00:09:22.680
their motivation behind it was pretty clear as using a dot-mask CRT would

00:09:22.680 --> 00:09:25.960
suuuuuuck for oscilloscope applications.

00:09:25.960 --> 00:09:30.140
Using a phosphor-dot free CRT would fill with
glee the hearts of thee!

00:09:30.140 --> 00:09:32.360
said someone at Tektronix probably.

00:09:32.360 --> 00:09:37.340
So, they came up with the idea of using an
LC shutter over a black and white CRT to provide

00:09:37.350 --> 00:09:40.610
coloration AFTER the image had been drawn.

00:09:40.610 --> 00:09:42.280
Pretty neat thinking.

00:09:42.280 --> 00:09:46.080
As far as why it took nearly two decades for
the technology to find its way into video

00:09:46.080 --> 00:09:50.360
monitors, well again that’s probably due
to the much greater processing power needed

00:09:50.360 --> 00:09:55.280
to extract and store the R, G, and B components
of an analog television signal so that they

00:09:55.280 --> 00:09:57.480
could be re-displayed sequentially.

00:09:57.480 --> 00:10:01.860
Interestingly, I can’t find any reference
in either the owner’s manual or on the device

00:10:01.860 --> 00:10:06.430
itself to any patents at all, let alone those
held by Tektronix.

00:10:06.430 --> 00:10:11.130
Their patent didn’t expire until 2004, so
presumably JVC would have needed to license

00:10:11.130 --> 00:10:12.880
it from Tektronix.

00:10:12.880 --> 00:10:17.070
Or perhaps the Tektronix patent just didn’t apply
to video monitors.

00:10:17.070 --> 00:10:18.070
Or some other thing happened.

00:10:18.070 --> 00:10:22.720
But in any case, I do think it’s pretty
neat that this technology made its way into

00:10:22.720 --> 00:10:25.730
a color television monitor at least once.

00:10:25.730 --> 00:10:31.300
It’s not exactly the same as the CBS color
wheel system, but it gives a great approximation

00:10:31.300 --> 00:10:33.880
of what that world would have looked like.

00:10:33.880 --> 00:10:34.860
Thanks for watching!

00:10:34.860 --> 00:10:39.800
I told myself I was going to make a quick
video and, by golly, I think I did!

00:10:39.800 --> 00:10:40.800
Wow!

00:10:41.440 --> 00:10:46.020
Many thanks are owed to patron Brendan Terrett
for suggesting this topic to me.

00:10:46.020 --> 00:10:51.320
I had no idea these existed and it’s a perfect
complement to the whole color TV saga.

00:10:51.320 --> 00:10:52.740
It's also just...

00:10:52.740 --> 00:10:53.900
really neat!

00:10:53.900 --> 00:10:57.900
And of course, thank you to everyone who supports
this channel on Patreon, with special thanks

00:10:57.910 --> 00:11:00.520
going to the folks scrolling up your screen.

00:11:00.520 --> 00:11:03.460
If you’d like to support my work with a
pledge of your own, you can find out how by

00:11:03.460 --> 00:11:06.520
clicking the link in the description or on
the end screen.

00:11:06.520 --> 00:11:09.240
Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll
see you next time!

00:11:10.200 --> 00:11:13.320
♫ cleverly smooth jazz ♫

00:11:17.560 --> 00:11:18.640
Oh, [expletive]!

00:11:18.640 --> 00:11:19.400
Ha ha!

00:11:19.660 --> 00:11:22.580
I can't see... (wheezy laughs)

00:11:22.580 --> 00:11:25.040
I can't see the teleprompter with these on!

00:11:26.320 --> 00:11:26.820
(clears throat)

00:11:27.600 --> 00:11:30.580
You might be familiar with the active shutter...

00:11:30.580 --> 00:11:32.880
Active shutter?

00:11:32.880 --> 00:11:38.620
You might be familiar with the active shutters used in some 3D glasses...

00:11:38.620 --> 00:11:39.120
(exasperation sound)

00:11:40.300 --> 00:11:41.240
Hey there.

00:11:41.760 --> 00:11:43.440
Not too many bloopers today, huh?

00:11:44.800 --> 00:11:46.800
That's OK. The music is fun, too.

00:11:48.300 --> 00:11:51.060
Oh, and that thing the LC color shutter does is trippy and weird.

00:11:52.140 --> 00:11:55.220
Glad I realized that. Helps make up for the lack of bloopers.

00:11:58.240 --> 00:12:00.340
Do you know why chicken coops have two doors?

00:12:00.960 --> 00:12:03.040
Well, if they had four they'd be chicken sedans.

00:12:03.560 --> 00:12:05.920
This is not what captions are generally used for, but I don't play by the rules!

00:12:06.880 --> 00:12:07.880
♫ LIQUID CRYSTAL COLOR SHUTTER ♫

00:12:08.100 --> 00:12:09.140
♫ LIQUID CRYSTAL COLOR SHUTTER ♫

00:12:09.340 --> 00:12:10.480
♫ LIQUID CRYSTAL COLOR SHUTTER ♫

00:12:10.640 --> 00:12:11.500
♫ COLOR WITH A WEIRD TRICK ♫

00:12:12.060 --> 00:12:13.000
SHUTTER POWER!!!