why are tv’s always rectangular, but never round?
In: 0
(Ignoring the high likelihood this is a trolling question)
The simple answer is because the overwhelming majority of TV content is shot and captured for presentation on a rectangular screen.
There’s no value in having a circular screen if 99.9% of the content only appears in a rectangular spaced section of the screen.
That said there was a bit of a phase with funky shaped TVs some of which were round (e.g. [this one](https://www.retrotogo.com/2011/12/ebay-watch-1960s-space-age-keracolor-circular-television.html))
There are lots of things that are naturally round or tend towards roundness. But for most human equipment and stuff, it is usually far easier to make things move in straight lines. Therefore many objects tend to have straight sides. Other than using something like a huge round drill or cutter, it is much easier to design things to cut in straight lines. It is also easier to make things flat.
One possibly interesting factoid is that early TVs were made out of cathode ray tubes that were essentially curved and could be envisioned as a surface cut from a sphere. However, the way the tubes were controlled was by using electromagnets that were more or less orthogonal and this gives rise to scan lines – basically forming the image out of a zig zag line going from the top of the screen to the bottom. This more or less ended up with a rectangular image.
It is also fairly intuitive to break up a screen into a coordinate system that has a certain number of rows and columns. In order to make a modern LED screen, each pixel is made identical and laid out in this kind of grid pattern. This makes a square/rectangular shape the most efficient to manufacture and to program to use.
TLDR; things with mostly straight sides are easy to make, curved and round things are typically harder to make.
Even if there was circular content to watch on a tv, and even if there was a good reason why a circular screen would be better, it still makes sense to manufacture them as square
it’s just less waste because screens get made for sheets of glass, if you have to cut off all the corners that’s just waste, you can’t do more with that, just use all the glass and make a bigger square screen that can still show round video if you really want to
The concept of TVs followed the concept of moving pictures on film. Film tends to be long and square, and consists of tough see-through stuff coated with expensive stuff. Film that has round pictures on it would either a) need to be coated in round patches and precisely aligned in the camera and projector, or b) be very wasteful since lot of the expensive stuff would go unused.
Lenses, as used for cameras and projectors, also natively create a round picture, and are more expensive to make the larger that round picture needs to be – BUT, lenses are not used up when filming, while film certainly is.
Early televisions actually were round because a picture tube is a glass vessel with a vacuum in it, and such a vessel is easiest to make sturdy if it is as round as possible. But the picture transmitted was always square (the tv either wasted some picture or some space on the screen), because a TV system transmits the picture line by line. The electronics to do that were already difficult to make in the early 20th century, and would have been even more difficult to make if the lines were not all the same length.
TVs originally had round screens. Then came flat top and bottom with rounded sides. If I remember correctly, it had to do with the pattern of the “gun” that shot electrons onto the screen.
Modern displays inherited their from factor from earlier tech like cathode ray tube displays and film. Those techs had rectangular shapes images for reasons of practicality.
For the longest time, round displays where they existed for special purposes were just regular rectangular ones with the corners covered up. Only in the last couple of years have actual round displays been produced en mass. Those are mostly in the size of smart watches and the computers connected to them still treat them as rectangular displays and just don’t make use of the missing edges.
This is another reason: without displays displays, there hasn’t been a lot of media produced for round displays, which means that nobody wanted to make round displays because there was no media for it.
Round cathode ray TV display tubes were made from the 1930s, but the image displayed was a rectangle because it was made up of several hundred horizontal lines of the same length. Rectangular tubes with rounded corners were made starting in the 1950s because the space at the top and bottom of the round tube was wasted. They got more sharply rectangular as the designers figured out how.
Originally because filming was done on rectangular pieces of film, which was easier to manufacture, to handle and had less material waste than round shapes.
Nowadays I would imagine it’s just generally easier to move and install and store and transport rectangular screens.
The vast majority of televisions on the market are rectangular in shape. There are a few reasons for this. First, it is easier and cheaper to mass produce rectangular screens than it is to make round ones. Second, most people prefer the look of a rectangular television over a circular one. And finally, when you sit down in front of a rectangle TV, you can see more of the picture than you would be able to if it were round.
Latest Answers