why are tv’s always rectangular, but never round?
In: 0
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.
Latest Answers