Ed’s View — A Parallel World

In the vary wee days in television history, back in the late 1800's, one of the first concepts devised for a means to electrically transport images was via parallel wires. In this scheme an image was focused on a small array of crude selenium sensors. Each sensor represented one pixel. The varying current caused by the changes in resistance of the each sensor when excited by light was coupled to a respective lamp at the receiving end. Each pixel, therefore, had its own wire. Obviously, an image with any reasonable degree of resolution would require at least several hundred very small sensors and lamps and a like number of wires. Clearly, this was not practical, and the "parallel pixel" scheme for television was abandon. Then, first mechanical then electronic scanning was invented, and the rest is history. (By the way, sequential scanning represents the first application of video compression, albeit in the time domain.) Now comes a very interesting development by...