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How does a screen work?

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573 points chkhd | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.471s | source
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retrac ◴[] No.44551618[source]
CRTs are still slightly magical to me. The image doesn't really exist. It's an illusion. If your eyes operated at electronic speeds, you would see a single incredibly bright dot-point drawing the raster pattern over and over. This YouTube video by "The Slow Mo Guys" shows this in action: https://youtu.be/3BJU2drrtCM?t=190
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grishka ◴[] No.44551812[source]
To me the magical part about CRTs is color. I don't quite understand how the shadow mask works. Like, yeah, there are three guns, one for each color channel, and the openings in the mask match their layout, and somehow the beam coming out of each gun can only ever hit its corresponding phosphor dots. Even after being deflected. But... how? Also, wouldn't the deflection coils affect each of the three beams slightly differently?
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1. Sharlin ◴[] No.44552058[source]
It's parallax, basically. The pigment dots and mask holes are positioned such that when you look from the perspective of the "red" electron gun (*), you only see red pigment dots. Move a couple cm to the "blue" gun and the parallax shift now makes you to see only blue pigment dots instead. Or from the other direction, no matter which "red" dot you stand at, you only see the "red" gun through "your" hole.

The exact sizes, shapes, and positions of the pigment dot triples (and/or the mask holes) are presumably chosen so that this holds even away from the main axis. Also, the shape of the deflecting field is probably tuned to keep the rays as well-focused as possible. Similarly to how photographic lenses are carefully designed to minimize aberrations and softness even far from the optical axis.

(*) Simplifying a bit by assuming that the beam gets deflected immediately as it leaves the gun, which is of course inaccurate.