How has TV tech evolved?

On 26 January 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated a working television at his London lab. However, few of us today would recognise what he called a ‘televisor’ as a TV. It used mechanically driven discs covered with lenses. These broke down light reflected by an object. The reflections were turned into an electrical signal and transmitted to a radio receiver that reconstructed an image of the object.

Baird’s mechanical television was quickly replaced by an electronic version, which made it easier to capture and transmit images. In 1931, Allen B DuMont’s cathode-ray tube (CRT) set the standard for television. Even the shift from black-and-white to colour TV in the late 1960s still used the same technology, cementing the place of the ‘tube’ in our homes for the rest of the 20th century.

Since the millennium, however, there’s been a TV tech explosion. Not only have these innovations kicked CRTs to the curb, they’ve been hard to keep up with. In 20 years we’ve gone from plasma TVs you could hang on your wall to OLEDs that are as little as 4mm thick. At the same time the images have gotten much sharper, with the development of 1080p or Full HD giving way to 4K and increasingly 8K.