The Indian Head Test Pattern was a black and white television test pattern which was introduced in 1939 by RCA of Harrison, New Jersey as a part of the RCA TK-1 Monoscope. Its name comes from the original art of a Native American featured on the card.
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The Indian Head Test Pattern became familiar to the large post-war Baby Boom TV audiences in America from 1947 onwards; it would often follow the formal television station sign-off after the United States national anthem. The Indian Head was also used in Canada, following the Canadian national anthem sign-off in the evening. It was also used by Rhodesia Television (RTV) during British colonial times (varying between Northern and Southern Rhodesia), as the pattern was displayed following the playing of (God Save the Queen). This test pattern was later used by Venezuelan TV channel Venevision, in conjunction with the RMA Resolution Chart 1941, in the mid and late 1970s before the Venezuelan anthem (Gloria al bravo pueblo).
The Indian Head pattern could variously be seen: after sign-off but while the station was still transmitting; while transmitting prior to a typical 6 AM formal sign-on; or even during the daylight morning hours on newer low budget stations, which typically began their broadcast day with midday local programming around 10 or 11 AM.[1]
During the late 1950s the test pattern gradually began to be seen less frequently, after fewer sign-offs, on fewer stations, and for shorter periods in the morning, since new and improved TV broadcast equipment required less adjusting. In later years the test pattern was transmitted for as little as a minute after studio sign-off while the transmitter engineer logged required Federal Communications Commission-USA/Industry Canada transmitter readings, and then turned off the power.
Towards the end of the Indian Head TV era (around the late 1970s), there was no nightly test pattern on some stations, typically when automatic logging and remote transmitter controls allowed shutdown of power immediately after the formal sign-off. After an immediate transmitter power off, in lieu of the Indian Head Test Card and its sine wave tone, a TV viewer heard a loud audio hiss like FM radio interstation noise and saw the video noise[2] colloquially called snow (but resembling "bugs" following a TV-system technical improvement).[3] Audio and video noise received on Indian Head era TV sets respectively indicated the absence of analog aural and visual broadcast carriers. Consumer TVs typically did not have a no-signal noise muting and blanking feature until the late analog TV period.
When USA broadcasters transitioned to color television, the SMPTE color bars superseded the black-and-white test pattern image. In Sweden the Indian head was used in test transmissions from the Royal Institute of Technology from 1948 until November 1958 when it was replaced by the Sveriges Television test card.
The primary and critical Indian Head Test Pattern was not itself a card. Rather, it was generated directly as a monochrome video signal by means of a monoscope camera.
An RCA TK-1 Monoscope Camera is a 19-inch rack-mounted chassis, which contains electronic circuits needed to operate a glass cathode ray tube[1] housed inside an anti-magnetic steel shield.[4] The cathode ray component is a TV-camera vacuum tube known as a monoscope, because it videographs only one still image, the test pattern. The tube has a perfectly proportioned copy of the test pattern master art inside, permanently deposited as a carbon image on an aluminum target plate or slide.[5] This perfect copy allowed all of the television studio and production control room video monitors, and home television sets, to be identically adjusted for minimum distortions such as ovals instead of circles. When the monitor or TV set was correctly adjusted to show test pattern circles, the received picture's aspect ratio was exactly four units wide by three units high. The 4 by 3 standard was chosen by the National Television System Committee (NTSC) for analog television, so that film movies would be compatible with TV broadcasting. 4:3 is the same aspect ratio used by 16mm and classic 35mm motion picture film frames.[6]
The graphic of the Indian and all of the patterns on the chart served specific purposes. With the chart many typical daily (sometimes hourly) adjustments on cameras, home, and studio monitors could be made. An experienced broadcast engineer could glance at the drawing of the Indian Chief and quickly know if everything was OK or if more careful adjustment was needed. Within the chart the tools necessary to adjust perspective, framing, linearity, frequency response, differential gain, contrast and white level (brightness) are all provided. The grid and circles were used for perspective, framing and linearity. The tapered lines (marked with 20, 25, 30, and 35) were used for resolution and frequency response. The thin lines marked from 575 to 325 on one side and 300 to 50 on the other side referred to lines of resolution. The gray bands emerging from the center off to the lower right and upper left were for differential gain, contrast, and white level.
Only after the monitors were adjusted was an actual Indian Head Test Card used. A cardboard mounted lithograph of the test pattern was typically attached to a rolling vertical easel in each TV studio, to be videographed by each studio camera during test time. Then the cameras were adjusted to appear identical on picture monitors, by alternately switching between and comparing the monoscope image and the test card image. Such adjustments were made on a regular basis because television system electronics then used hot vacuum tubes, the operating characteristics of which drifted throughout each broadcast day.
Test patterns were also broadcast to the public daily to allow regular adjustments by home television set owners and TV shop repair technicians.[1] In this regard, various features in the pattern were included to facilitate focus and contrast settings, and the measurement of resolution. The circular "bulls-eyes" in the centre and the four corners permitted uniform deflection yoke and oscillator amplitude adjustments for centering, pincushioning, and image size.
The test pattern was usually accompanied by a 1,000 or 400 hertz sine wave test tone, which demonstrated that the TV aural receiver was working.[7] If the tone was pure-sounding rather than a buzz or rattle, then transmitted speech and music would not be distorted. 400 Hz is somewhat less annoying for technicians to hear for extended work periods.[8]
An actual Indian Head Test Card, the pattern as printed on art-grade white cardboard, was only of secondary importance to television system adjustment, but many of them were saved as souvenirs, works of found art, and inadvertent mandalas. By contrast, nearly all of the hard-to-open, steel-shielded, vacuum glass monoscope tubes were junked with their hidden Indian Head Test Pattern target plates still inside. The monoscope target plates were also small, a few inches in size, while the showy camera test cards were sized on the order of 1-½ feet by 2 feet, making them natural keepers for picture-framed wall display.
The original art work was completed for RCA by an artist named Brooks on August 23, 1938. The master art was improbably discovered in a dumpster by a wrecking crew worker as the old RCA factory in Harrison, NJ was being demolished in 1970. The worker kept the art for over 30 years, and then used the Internet to locate and sell it to a test pattern collector.[9]
As of 2011, most television stations in the United States no longer sign off overnight, instead running infomercials, networked overnight news shows, syndicated TV re-runs, or old movies, but the Indian Head Test Card persists as a symbol of early television. It was even sold as a night-light (from 1997 to 2005 by the Archie McPhee company),[10] reminiscent of the times when a fairly common late-night experience was to fall asleep while watching the late movie, only to awaken to the characteristic sine wave tone accompanying the Indian Head Test Pattern on a black-and-white TV screen.
Many of the nation's television stations used the image of the Indian Head card to be their final image broadcast when they signed off their analog signals for the final time between February 17 and June 12, 2009, as part of the United States digital television transition.
This test card appears as the first loading screen in Fallout and Fallout 3, as part of the series' retro-futurism. It also appears in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood as a puzzle for Subject 16. It also appears in Call of Duty: Black Ops, in between the missions of the singleplayer campaign, and in Bioshock and Bioshock 2, appearing on various television screens. The start screen for Zombie Apocalypse features the test screen with a zombified Indian head. More recently, the image has been featured in an agitprop vein by Anonymous in a video calling for the resignation of the current Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke.[11]
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