For

televisions Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, ...

the picture line-up generation equipment (PLUGE or pluge) is the

greyscale In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a grayscale image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an ''amount'' of light; that is, it carries only intensity information. Gray ...

test pattern A test card, also known as a test pattern or start-up/closedown test, is a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active but no program is being broadcast (often at sign-on and sign-off). Used since the ear ...

s used in order to adjust the

black level Video black level is defined as the level of brightness at the darkest (black) part of a visual image or the level of brightness at which no light is emitted from a screen, resulting in a pure black screen. Video displays generally need to be cal ...

and contrast of the picture monitor. Various PLUGE patterns can be generated, the most common consisting of three vertical bars of super-black, normal black, and near-black and two rectangles of mid-gray and white (sometimes these are measured in

IRE Ire or IRE may refer to: Ire * Extreme anger; intense fury * Irē, the Livonian name for Mazirbe, Latvia * A town in Oye, Nigeria * ''Ire'' (album), a 2015 album by the Australian metalcore band Parkway Drive * Ire (Iliad), a town mentioned in ...

). These three PLUGE pulses are included in the

SMPTE The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the m ...

color bars SMPTE color bars are a television test pattern used where the NTSC video standard is utilized, including countries in North America. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) refers to the pattern as Engineering Guideline ...

(at the bottom and near the right) used for

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

, and SÉCAM.

External links

* Television technology {{tv-tech-stub