That Pesky Television Test Pattern

Wow, I remember seeing those. Also remember the sometimes humorous "Please Stand By… We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties" screens. Remember one in St. Louis that was an illustration of a guy with headphones on at a control panel, holding a bunch of unplugged wires. And he had three arms. It was for the local PBS channel. Funny stuff!!!

VR/

You get into a grey area (heh) by lumping "test patterns" into one category...plain ol' analog NTSC television has had a lot of them, for special purposes. There are the test pattern/ID/slides that they put up at the edges of the broadcast day...more than anything, they were to serve as a legal ID first, and secondarily make sure that the transmitter, as it came up and stabilized (tubes warming up, remember), was in the ballpark of doing the right thing.

TV registration charts, with a grid pattern along with concentric circles, ensured the multiple tubes of a color camera or camera in a "film chain"--the assembly where slides and motion picture film became a TV signal-- were aligned with each other (once a lengthy, manual process), and the 'chip chart' --a series of greyscale squares -- made sure the tubes of the color camera were putting out matching levels so that a proportioned grey signal--not too red, too blue, or too contrasty--was put out.

You could accidentally see any of these on the air--depending on what piece of equipment was being tested. But most often, the camera-setup patterns were only seen by engineers within the station's facility. If it went on the air, it tended to have the station's call letters--legal IDs used to be important.

As Chuck Pharis elaborates, the Indian Head test pattern was created by a specialized piece of RCA gear (the "TK-1C Monoscope Camera"), and thus found its way into many TV stations. (Chuck is a legendary TV equipment collector, and a bit of a capitalist--he's selling reproductions of the original test pattern art.) The Wiki-P entry is pretty complete on its origins...the "why" is they needed a detailed, standardized line drawing, and they had this one.

Yes, I hang around a lot of TV geezers.

It was common when TV first came out. You used to see these all the time. I think it also keeps broadcasters in screen safe areas

Nicolette
http://www.furnitureanddesignideas.com/

When my wife and I talk about TV in our respective households growing up, both of us, independently (me in New York, she in Indiana) experienced turning on the TV and finding "the indian" on.

Being a child of the 80s I only remember the color bars. They have a set for HD now too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SMPTE_Color_Bars.svg

I'm old enough to remember B&W test patterns, but don't remember them well enough to say "I saw *that* one!"

Those interested in test patterns in the UK might wish to visit http://www.testcardcircle.org.uk/

The game Fallout 3 uses this static image in a really beautiful way for the load screen at the beginning of each game and during certain load times throughout. very cool.

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/news/06/05/fallout3_screen003.jpg

These oddly mesmerizing test patterns were followed by the morning farm report in my suburban childhood (creating a kind of kinship with the not so distant reaches of agriculture - then thriving in San Diego's Mission Valley). The farm report pictured a single rooster with the sun rising behind it while news of the day's favorable or unfavorable agricultural conditions were narrated in somber tones by an off-screen reporter. I must have been an early riser. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Besides the "Indian head" - which was "lined" rather than gradated due to the fact that monoscopes could only reproduce black and white, period - there was another "lined" pattern, which was based loosely on the NBC test pattern shown here. Test patterns were usually presented in the following ways: on boards or cards (hence the British "test card" terminology), 35mm slides (as the case from the mid-1960's onwards with color patterns that were adaptations of the NBC pattern), light boxes (with 8" x 10" transparencies), telops, or (in the case of the Indian head) monoscopes. It was also not unheard of for stations to have such patterns at both their studios and their transmitting facilities. Sometimes there were slight differences from the two sources.

While for station i d visual, came upon your site.
I work in televison broadcasting, have so since 1975. As a kid growing in chicago, Il I saw those test patterns.

I work KMOV ch 4 known in it's CBS days as KWK-TV and then KMOX-TV. One of my prizes is a kinescope of the KMOX-TV test.

I got into the business because I fell under it's spell, finally, I have a picture of WCIU-TV Channel 26, Chicago's first UHF station. Anyway nice site, (as we leave the air, we invite you to join at this same time again, please standby for WCRW, WSBC sharing this frequency, the time as we leave the 4:35 p.m

An interesting article about the history of test patterns. As a master control operator at KDOC in Anaheim, CA in the mid 90's we used the SMPTE color bars to calibrate the over-the-air transmitter output before officially signing on at 6AM every weekday morning. They were also (and still are) recorded at the start of program tapes to set the levels before it went to air.

During the US digital TV transition on June 12, 2009 (and February 17 before that), several stations made the final analog sign-off into a big production, with a formal legal station ID, a flashback video of events in that channel's history, a video of "The Star Spangled Banner", then the Indian Head test pattern. It was probably done for nostalgia's sake, but the transition was indeed an historic event in broadcasting history and that was not lost on those stations.

I have a playlist of some of those test pattern analog sendoffs on my YouTube page:
http://www.youtube.com/user/richartrod#grid/user/D364DB45D14B329C

Test patterns are still used in-studio at TV stations, but they are obviously now reformatted for widescreen, 1080-pixel high definition.