International Business Machines Corporation

Andrew Paton

Brian D Chase

Brian R Sowter

Peter Burr

A color CRT has stripes of different color light emission phosphors (r, g and b) deposited on a faceplate of the tube with the relative widths of the stripes being inversely proportional to the light emission efficiency of the phosphors. By this means the integrated brightness of the emitted light from the different phosphor stripes is the same for the same value beam current. By using a novel double shadow mask arrangement, the widths of the beams from the three guns can be made to match, or substantially to match, the widths of the phosphor elements on which they land. Specifically, the beam from one gun is aligned with apertures through both masks in order to transmit a relatively wide portion of the beam onto the least efficient, phosphor. The portion of the beams transmitted by the first mask for the other two guns are further clipped by the relatively off-set apertures in the second mask. This arrangement enables the advantage of the balanced color output from the screen to be enjoyed without loss of purity margin and provides a significant increase in brightness for a given beam current and/or resolution of the screen. The invention is applicable to CRTs employing shadow masks with slots and phosphor stripes, or holes and phosphor dots and also for CRTs driven in raster scan or vector mode.

Shadow mask color CRT with enhanced resolution and/or brightness

The dimensions and light output of a beam in a shadow mask cathode-ray tube are determined by means of an optical system 7 focussed on a phosphor dot to pick up and record the light generated by a ray 4 passing through a single aperture 6 in the shadow mask 2. The cathode-ray beam 1 is moved so that the whole cross-section of the beam passes the aperture 4. The detected light outputs are plotted to provide an accurate representation of the whole beam. Repeating the procedure for each gun gives a precise record of the misconvergence of the beam

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Eastleigh, United Kingdom

Andrew Paton