4 ms·

When I was growing up in the UK you'd see this[1] on the TV regularly, sometimes for hours at a time. [1] http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/testcards/images/169_

• rwmj 10y ago
  Probably better to link to the very rich history of the Test Card: http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/testcards/bbc.html http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/testcards/bbc.html
  • schoen 10y ago
    Wikipedia also has some information on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Hersee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Hersee
  • tomn 10y ago
    That's a great link, thanks. I was actually looking for an image of testcard 61 (at the bottom of that page), a copy of which I saw being used only a few years ago! 57 is interesting too; the black square in the centre is actually a hole leading into a box lined with black felt, to provide a black reference. The generation and use of test cards and patterns is a surprisingly complicated subject; even in the digital age.
  • vidarh 10y ago
    A close variation of test card G on that page is common in a long list of countries, as it came from a highly successful commercially available test-card generator, and the pattern has since been copied and modified all over the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_PM5544 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_PM5544
    • vanderZwan 10y ago
      Yeah, I remember that image. I always thought it was a weird oppressive robot face staring at me, like some kind of Big Brother in the television. I even had a nightmare as a kid once believing the TV came alive and turned into a robot slowly chasing after me like a zombie.
  • jcrawfordor 10y ago
    A popular test card in the US, which you can still see in some digitizations of black-and-white era recordings, is RCA's "Indian Head" card, named after the line drawing at the top for subjective sharpness checking: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/RCA_Indian_Head_test_pattern.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/RCA_Indi... I'm rather fond of that test pattern because it was usually generated by a dedicated piece of hardware that scanned a CRT beam across a metal plate with the image on it. This was to produce a more reliable source image than the more common practice of pointing a camera at a test card in the studio - and is an odd predecessor to today's test-pattern generators.
• DrScump 10y ago
  She really needs to work on her tic-tac-toe strategy.
  • scholia 10y ago
    It's actually Noughts and Crosses ;-)
  • pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I think she'll still beat the inanimate puppet.
  • jamoes 10y ago
    If she's 'X', then playing in the bottom-center square will put the game on the path toward a cat's game. Perhaps the puppet is strong AI, and she's trying to teach it that in some games, the only winning move is not to play.
    • LeoPanthera 10y ago
      Perhaps she would enjoy a nice game of chess.
  • LeoPanthera 10y ago
    The "X" on the board represents the exact center of the screen.
• smacktoward 10y ago
  It could have been worse, you could have grown up in Scarfolk: https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-bbc-test-card-witch.html https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-bbc-test-card-witc...
• throwanem 10y ago
  Worth mentioning here: The Quiz Broadcast [1]. [1] https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3Dx8Yxab-uFpPdulB4g2rw5bpJIFlcPU https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3Dx8Yxab-uFpPdulB4g2rw...
  • JonnieCache 10y ago
    Christ, I'd forgotten how grim these were.
    • throwanem 10y ago
      Remain indoors.