The Evolution of High-Definition TV--and Saying Bye-Bye to Analog TV on 2/17/09

The ability to see an image clearly has always been a part of the art aesthetic since the beginnings of primitive art. Restorations of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" dry wall fresco, for example, have been ongoing for hundreds of years just so we can see and appreciate his amazing detail...only to create several overzealous theories once we could finally (and controversially) see it in high-definition on our computer screens. It's amazing that after hundreds of years of appreciating physical works of art that helped us see what we were missing--the world was still willing to sit around a tiny little box that broadcast grainy black and white images on its viewing screen. This was during the earliest days of families buying televisions right after WWII ended. But the earliest prototypes of television images only had 12 lines of resolution that had to be stepped up in order for television to be something more than just an experiment that had the possibility of not becoming commercial. By 1936, (and as usual) the British were already ahead of the game and managed to create a process of 405 lines of resolution to early television models. And leave it to the French to best that in 1948 with an incredible 819 lines of resolution through their TV broadcasts. That was considered true black and white high-definition at the time in comparison to anything else available in the world until the advent of real digital signals.