How does a TV work?

A TV is a sandwich of a dozen layers, lit from behind by LEDs and switched by 25 million tiny liquid-crystal shutters, sixty times a second. A 4K screen has 3840 × 2160 = 8.29 million pixels, each made of a red, a green and a blue subpixel.

Read how it works: How does a TV work? · The history of television · More boxes on Glassbox

Chapters in this interactive model

1. Inside a flat-screen TV: A lamp at the back, a sandwich of films and glass in front, and a computer to run it.
2. Millions of dots, three colours each: Zoom in until the picture falls apart into red, green and blue.
3. How liquid crystal lets light through: Two crossed filters block everything, unless the crystal twists the light.
4. Screens that make their own light: Why OLED blacks are truly black, and how quantum dots make purer colours.
5. Still pictures that seem to move: Why 24, 50, 60 or 120 frames a second, and why fast things blur.
6. From the studio to your screen: A thousand times too much data, squeezed down the air, a dish, a cable or the internet.