Television sets or televisions receive broadcast transmissions featuring color or black and white moving images and sound. The broadcast medium that we call television is the vehicle that is used to transmit those sounds and images. In the late 1930s television emerged as a viable method of entertainment and today it is rare that a household does not have at least one television.
Televisions can be used to view broadcast signals from television stations or recorded information from video cassettes, digital video discs (DVDs) and Blu-ray discs. Many televisions or TVs, as they are often referred to, have built in video cassette decks or DVD players.
The standard television broadcast signal is actually a radio transmission that is divided into channels that are housed in the 54-890 megahertz frequency band. Surround sound, stereo-quality and high definition image reception are also standard features on most televisions available in today's market. In June of 2009 the U.S. Government required that all television broadcast stations switch from analog signals to digital signals.
Inside all televisions there are many electronic circuits. These circuits receive and decode the broadcast signals that are sent out and convert them to video and sound. Consumers are presented with many choices when it comes to color and shape of televisions. Since polymer based plastics are used to create the shells of televisions they can be nearly any color or shape that is imaginable. In most cases, though, the standard colors range from grays and blacks to silver and the standard shape of a television will generally be square or rectangular. To date, the smallest televisions available are made by MicroEmissive Displays. The "eyescreen" is a television device that can fit directly in front of a person's eye on a pair of glasses and is about the size of a human pupil. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the 150 inch television offered by Panasonic that was given the distinction of being the world's largest television in 2008.
Today, consumers can choose from four different types of televisions; CRT or standard cathode ray displays are called direct view tube televisions, plasma screen televisions are wall-mountable units, Liquid Crystal Displays or LCDs are also flat screen and offer amazing picture quality and RPTVs or rear projection televisions offer an option that projects the television image onto the screen from the back. These units are gaining in popularity because they are not quite as bulky as CRT units, but not nearly as expensive as plasma or LCD televisions.
Handheld televisions use a thin-film transistor or TFT color LCD display. Televisions of this type are, for obvious reasons, relatively small and look similar to handheld radios. These small televisions were the distant relatives of the newer cell phones that contain television receivers.
With the advent and use of broadcast over the Internet, the future of television is bright, indeed.
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