Do you understand how television screens work? If you understand them, have you ever seen how they work?
It’s kind of a silly question — of course you’ve seen working television screens — but this video from The Slo Mo Guys shows what your television is doing in ultra slow motion, and in great detail.
The results are pretty cool, and the entire video shown above is worth your time. But if you just want to see how an old CRT screen paints single frames from an original NES one line at a time, you can check it out below. You can even see how the electron gun moves from left to right.
This, on the other hand, is what the pixels on a modern 4K LCD TV look like. You can watch the colors you see on the left and compare them to what the pixels are doing when viewed up close on the right.
The last bit might be the most interesting. This is an OLED 4K TV, and you can see both black areas of the screen as well as the pixels. The importance here is the per-pixel brightness, which means no light passes through pixels located where the image is supposed to be dark. This is what leads to brighter colors and deeper blacks on OLED TVs, and it’s very apparent when shown up close.
You have now seen how your television works, up close and personal. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
