A Nipkow disk is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented in 1885. It was a fundamental component in mechanical television, and thus the first televisions, through the 1920s and 1930s. The device is a mechanically spinning disk with a series of equally-distanced circular holes of equal diameter drilled in it.
About Nipkow disk in brief
A Nipkow disk is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented in 1885. It was a fundamental component in mechanical television, and thus the first televisions, through the 1920s and 1930s. The device is a mechanically spinning disk of any suitable material with a series of equally-distanced circular holes of equal diameter drilled in it. A lens projects an image of the scene in front of it directly onto the disk. Each hole in the spiral takes aslice through the image which is picked up as a temporal pattern of light and dark by a sensor. If the sensor is made to control a light behind a second NipKow disk rotating synchronously at the same speed and in the same direction, the image will be reproduced line-by-line.
The size of the reproduced image is again determined by theSize of the disc; a larger disc produces a larger image. The images were typically very small, as small as the surface used for scanning, which with the practical size of mechanical television were the size of a postage-stamp diameter disk. The disks used in early TV receivers were roughly 30cm to 50cm in diameter, with rare 200-hole disks tested. The acquisition part of the system was not much better, requiring a very powerful lighting system.
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This page is based on the article Nipkow disk published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
