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A SECTION
HORIZON
Capture a Video Moment
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Chris Nguyen
05/08/96
The Washington Post
H03
Consider those frustrating moments when you're watching "Friends"
or MTV and something really interesting flashes on the screen. It's
your favorite celebrity, wearing a funky outfit, or an important
phone number but you don't have a pen at your fingertips. Frantic,
you leap off the couch, reaching for the "record" button on the VCR,
but there's no tape in the machine, which isn't turned on anyway.
Missed opportunities such as these are among the reasons that
prompted Vincent Donohoe, president of Video Technologies, to
develop TV Picture Print, a device to be introduced later this year
that allows couch potatoes to print photographs of television
images. Whether it's the news or a movie on tape, this technology
turns video images into printed pictures you can put in photo
albums.
TV Picture Print is a joint venture among Video Technologies, a
Massachusetts-based company, and two established firms -- Polaroid
Corp., which will provide its Spectra instant film, and Zenith
Electronics Corp., which designed the prototypes. They are
television receivers with built-in electronics and optics to "grab"
pictures.
The new device is in the top front of the television. The instant
film costs about $10 for a 10-picture cartridge that slides into a
slot on the device.
"People like to have hard-copy prints," says Donohoe, who has
studied the statistics. Last year, manufacturers sold 23 million
television sets and 37 million camcorders in the United States.
Technology already exists for selecting single frames from a
television or videotape and producing color prints, but it requires
a printer that costs about $2,000. TV Picture Print's manufacturers
say their product will add about $200 to the cost of the television
when commercially available on models from Zenith, RCA and Magnavox
in August.
Say you want to make a picture. You press the freeze button on
the remote control, and a miniature "freeze-frame" image pops up at
one corner of the television screen while whatever you're watching
continues to play. The image stays frozen. If you like it, you hit
the "print" button, and a few seconds later, a plastic rectangle
slides from a slot in the TV set. As with a conventional Polaroid
picture, the image appears on the film in two minutes.
In addition to providing the film, Polaroid designed the "camera
back," the mechanism found in the company's instant cameras that
moves the film into position to be exposed and ejects it.
Here's how it works:
The picture on a television screen is generated by three electron
guns, each firing a stream of electrons at tiny dots of
phosphorescent chemicals coating the inside of the screen. Each gun
aims for dots that will glow red, green or blue. These are the three
primary colors of light, and all other colors, including white, are
generated by combinations of two or three.
The print maker taps the same signal that drives the electron
guns but routes it to two added pieces of hardware. One is a set of
three light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, that flash red, green or blue.
The other is a device called a "digital matrix shutter ring system."
The latter is a panel the size of a postage stamp that has
thousands of tiny "shutters" arranged in rows like the scan lines of
a TV image. The video signal instructs specific shutters to open,
allowing LED light to pass. The light reaches a lens that focuses it
on microscopic points on the film.
The shutters are not mechanical but electronic, controlled by
tiny patches of liquid crystals that can switch from opaque to
transparent when an electrical signal is applied.
The printer's electronic circuits analyze the video signal, turn
on an LED of one color and open the shutters to let that color
through to the points on the film where it should appear. Then it
repeats the process with the other two colors.
When all three colors have struck the film, it is ready to be
developed, just as if it had been exposed in an ordinary camera.
The quality of the printed picture depends on the quality of the
image on the television screen. The only way to manipulate the
prints is to adjust the contrast or color controls on the
television.
"Leave your camera at home," Donohoe says. "Go on vacation and
bring a camcorder. Come home, play the tape and freeze what you
want."
Chris Nguyen is a news aide at The Washington Post.
PHOTO-COLOR; INFO-GRAPHIC,,Robert Dorrell
CAPTION: HOW "TV PICTURE PRINT" WORKS
1. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) flash one color at a time,
guided by the TV picture signal.
2. Lens spreads the color to fall on entire surface of "digital
matrix shutter."
3. TV picture signal causes "digital matrix shutter" to open all
shutters where light of the LED color should be. Shutters are liquid
crystal, which turns from opaque to clear depending on application
of an electrical current.
4. Lens focuses light passing through shutters onto film.
SOURCE: Video Technologies
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