PRIMER ON DIGITAL TELEVISION

It is the aim of this paper to discuss the fundamentals of digital television in a simplified way, compare digital and conventional television and examine some of the encouraging possibilities and great difficulties facing developers of digital television systems. The concepts discussed as a necessary basics for aiding the understanding of digital television are: analog vs digital signals; continuous vs discrete data; resolution; nonlinearities and phase distortion; sampling and quantizing; modulation techniques; encoding; bandwidth. The motivation to develop digital television certainly exists - and this does not just mean to get a clearer picture on the screen of the viewer at home. The biggest motivating factor may be to get digitized signal processing equipment into studios. With such equipment, special effects, image enhancement and many other functions could be handled with great ease; it is likely that many could even be automated.