KOREAN electronics company Samsung wants to give you back something you didn't know you were missingpart of your TV picture.
Samsung calculates that existing TV sets display only 88 per cent of the image broadcast by the TV station. Now it has begun making HiTron TV sets with tubes that display the missing 12 per cent. Samsung calls the missing part of the picture the "hidden inch", because on large HiTron TV sets the picture is 2.5 centimetres wider than usual.
Conventional TV pictures have an aspect ratio of 4:3four units wide and three units tall. The extreme top and bottom of the picture are trimmed because the scanning lines at the top are filled with digital code, often for Teletext. If this area were visible, the viewer would see dancing black and white dots along the top of the screen.
To preserve the 4:3 ratio, the set also masks ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.