I'm feeling like the cat on a hot tin roof. Only a year-plus ago, I was writing
about the Three Phases of the then much-touted marriage of video and audio,
or TV and hi-fi if you wish, and now we are already heading straight into Phase
Three, the real revolution. Things are indeed heating up and I'll have to move
fast if I want to indulge in speculation as to what may be in store for us-before
it goes and happens, in the electronic flesh, not merely my imagination.
Phase Three, of course, is liberation from the tube, towards other and radically different methods of producing an electronic moving picture in color.
The direction in which this will take us is familiar enough. Those potent triplets, miniaturization, ultra-low power drain (from long lasting batteries) and astronomically increased versatility, are already with us now in a hundred ways.
When I look at my small, cheap, stick-on watch, or clock, bought two years ago for around seven bucks (and now selling for maybe less than three), I see future video. All this time, that little round timepiece, cream plastic with one small window showing the LCD numbers, has been flashing away, back and forth, alternating between the date and the exact time, neatly keeping track of all the months and their different numbers of days, including February-though this is by no means all the thing can do. Stick a pointed tool into its two little guide holes and you can get the usual, a stopwatch counting seconds, the time by itself minus date, and so on. You can guess that, this last February, I waited with the traditional bated breath to see what it would do with Leap Year.
Alas, it wasn't that brainy. Not programmed for Leap Year. I had to move it forward a day, which took about a half-hour since it involved my usual random pushings of the two control elements, through those little holes, until I could once more figure out what their functions were. (The directions, I found, were for me worse than meaningless. Better just to experiment.) I think it is a constructive analogy also to take note of my Lorus quartz wristwatch. This, too, has been running for ages-well, a year-on its original battery, and it keeps the usual astonishingly accurate time, but that is not my point. Unlike the little stick-on watch (which is stuck onto a tray on my kitchen table where its LCD numbers can catch the light at the right angle for legibility), the Lorus is a composite.
The main action is still mechanical. The hands go 'round, including the step-by-step second hand--which once again returns to the exact function that produced that name some centuries ago. (It is fascinating to watch my prerevolutionary grandfather clock's second hand keep in precise time with the second hand on my Lorus.) The date action is also mechanical, if battery driven, and therefore much less sophisticated than the cheaper LCD system. Its months are all the same, 31 days, because anything more complex than this would be mechanically monstrous and enough to kill the battery before its time. So every few months I have to go through the mechanical reset rigmarole.
Is that significant! This composite stage is where we also have been for years in just about every aspect of our hi-fi and recording fields, as well as the same in the entire video field.
Why, then, did I choose a wristwatch with old-fashioned hands that go 'round, instead of the more versatile number type? It was a thing I debated for a long time, as my earlier all-mechanical watch pestered me with the ' usual annoyances-it not only stopped when unwound but also stopped when wound up fully; it gained two minutes, then five minutes a day, and there was no adjustment, nor could I remember to remember when I had last reset it.
Its hands slipped loose and when put back in place caught against each other, converting the hour hand into a minute hand. Frankly, I never had a watch in my entire life that didn't pull a few of these annoying stunts on me, including an expensive Swiss pocket watch I got when I was 15.
The reason I like hands on my watch is simple. I read them at least twice as fast as I can read and translate numbers into time. And this is a very potent thought for all sorts of communications, digital or no.
What we must understand is that time, like most other vital parameters in electronics, is not by nature digital--it doesn't come in digits. When we digitize it, we are translating, just as we translate a basic or natural audio signal into a set of discrete quanta. Every time you look at a digital clock, you must reconvert, D/A, back to the simple flow of time itself. Like all our new digital processes, this one is extremely rapid, to the point where you are mostly unaware of it. And yet when you see 3:52:30 and then say out loud, "It's seven and a half minutes before four," you have performed a major transliteration. That is very different from our much-vaunted redundancy, the need for excess and overlapping information. This is a conversion, and a fairly complex one at that. It wastes time.
And energy of the human sort.
On the other hand, once you are trained up to it, the moving-hand system of indicating time is far more direct, and inherently quicker. It is a one-step process, visual position directly into your choice of verbal expression, if any. No digitalization in between. I am definitely conscious of that difference as I look alternatively at a set of time numbers and at a set of hands. Indeed, I observe that often enough I do not verbalize the time at all. I know what I need to know without the intervention of words. I am late, period! I know it so fast that there is no time or need for words.
We have committed ourselves to numbers for communication far beyond any earlier period. The numbers are easy to produce-that's why. But are they easy to read? Another story and, as A & P says, we had better mind our Ps and Qs in this respect. Numbers are stylish and so we have gone further into them than we should. True, we can learn to read numbers faster, and we do. We can, I suppose, learn to use them without consciously speaking their names in our heads. But the "position in space" readout is always going to be simpler, much more direct to the brain, and therefore more vitally useful. Colors in space, too. Why else our familiar red, yellow and green? Position and color-instantaneous, uncomplicated perceptions-have been recognized for centuries as the quickest way to affect intelligence when speed is vital, as in all railroad signals, not to mention signals at sea, weather information, traffic signs and so on.
The old radios took traditional note of this as the surest of principles. Numbers-but positioned out in space on the radio dial. Television was the first to depart, but there were only 13 channels to begin with. And at least they remained in numerical order, which is a subspecies of spatial position though one stage removed already.
Phase Three in the getting together of audio hi-fi and video TV is going to get us into this kind of thinking with a vengeance-if we take the time to think. We'd better. We are going to have an incredible spread of new miniaturizations, of low power drains, of versatility through microchips you can hardly see. The Lorus watch, above, might roughly be compared to our presently remarkable developments in tubed miniature TV. The tube is still there, and in most TV cameras too. But it is already foreshadowing in size the natural products of the coming tubeless age. The intermediate composite, astonishingly ingenious, beautifully designed and built (in Japan, of course), is already markedly ahead of its time (our present time), whether pocket TV or tiny video camera. And already foreshadowing the new usefulnesses of products yet to come, already incorporating some of them.
In the Lorus watch, it's crystal accuracy and a power supply to last a year plus, even with an old-fashioned mechanical movement, pared to minimal size and weight. In video, it's miniaturization and portability-big things to come and the wave of the future--but still the old tube, similarly pared down to minimize its tubeness.
Curious that, at the present stage of technology, the video composite format takes some odd twists. There is the new camera with a main picture receptor that-at last-is not a tube; but oddly, its finder, the tiny little B/W screen that now inevitably serves that function, remains a mini-TV tube. That means high voltage and the usual high drain, relatively speaking. Also the slow warm-up, so familiar through decades of every sort of tube. Even though the main camera in this composite is instantaneously ready to go.
Needless to say, the large run of video products are not yet of this progressive and experimental sort. We are still in Phase Two, decidedly, the integration of existing forms of video with our existing forms of hi-fi audio. That's another story and an exciting one, but this cat, as I say, is on a hot tin roof and I can't wait. I keep thinking of all sorts of radical, crazy things the new video and its new audio might do-the most immediate, as should be clear to anyone following the video news, being the return to home movies, a somewhat dead popular art in recent years in the old and silent film medium. (Sound film for consumer use has never managed to get far off the ground and for good reasons.) But now, in Phase Three video terms, and audio terms, home movies are going to come back.
Not really yet. The composite era is working hard in that direction, even so, trying to achieve home-style moving pictures with small cameras that really aren't small when you come down to it, dragging or carrying along VCRs too, plus long cables or packs full of batteries, plus even a monitor playback--excellent idea but even more cumbersome as of now. And the whole thing both complicated and hugely costly.
But in Phase Three, in all its glory, we'll have it! Plus more of the same. And other changes so startling that one can go way off the beam imagining them.
And just to show you-one of my own recent zany ideas. As a non-engineer, I made a minor mistake when I thought I understood one of the new ways of video playback, using the LCD. This system is practically with us now and no dream product: The LCD type video screen. The LCD is all over the place, including my stick-on watch and my elderly (already) calculator. No emitted light like the LED. Reflected light. That's how my LCDs work. You have to hold them in an outside light at just the right angle.
And flat! Look at the newest Canon card calculator, so thin you can bend the thing like a playing card. A reflected color picture like that? Wow! Just like in the old comics, a 1,000 watt light went on in my head. How about a video postcard? Undaunted by engineering problems, I worked it out in a few minutes.
Flat, slim TV screen, postcard size, portable. Like a postcard, you put its LCD surface under a bright light for viewing. But this would be a movie postcard, receiving a TV signal (somehow...). Sound too. Quarter-inch receiver, flat, along with the video, and maybe a half-inch speaker under the surface, up where the postmark usually lands. Boy, am I a quick designer. I just ignored the complications.
Then Hitachi let me on to some further truth. As I now soberly understand, the LCD video screen will not emit light but will reflect light, coming from in front. Millions, maybe, of open and-close color blinds, switchable on and off. When electronically off, they blend with the background. On, and you see a tiny spot of dark color. Do I have it right? If so, it sounds terrific to me. You could do anything with that.
Okay, then, let's make it an illuminated postcard, still flat and thin but with built-in lighting. White LEDs? Something fluorescent? Anyhow, a nice, flat battery inside, รก la Polaroid. No mere technical problems are going to faze me, you see.
So down with old-fashioned, silent, still postcards and also color prints.
Maybe the Polaroid battery could itself fluoresce, behind the LCD screen? And hey, how about a paper-thin mini videocassette to play inside my new color cards? There I go again.
(adapted from Audio magazine, June 1984; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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