A survey of the methods and colorimetric principles of colour television

The purpose of this paper is to present a brief survey of the principles of colour specification and reproduction in relation to colour television. The presentation falls naturally into three parts. Part I, after an outline of the principal historical steps in colour television, discusses the basic requirements of a satisfactory system, the principal current methods and the trends in present-day progress. Part II, which forms the main body of the paper, discusses, in a form useful to television engineers, the basic principles of colour specification, measurement and calculation. In this section, the concept of colour space is employed as a means of explaining the algebraic development of the trichromatic theory of colour representation, leading to an explanation of the origin and principal characteristics of the chromaticity diagram of the International Commission on Illumination. The paper concludes in Part III with an outline of the principles of three-colour reproduction in television.