Indian-head test pattern

It features a drawing of a Native American wearing a headdress surrounded by numerous graphic elements designed to test different aspects of broadcast display.

Each element of the card was designed to measure a specific technical aspect of television broadcast so that an experienced engineer could, at a glance, identify problems.

The card contains elements used to measure aspect ratio,[a] perspective, framing, linearity, frequency response, differential gain, contrast, and brightness.

The pattern began with the Indian-head portrait created in August 1938 by an artist named Brooks using pencil, charcoal, ink and zinc oxide.

First, they would use a monoscope in which the pattern was permanently embedded, which was capable of producing the image with a high degree of consistency due to the device's simplicity.

The tube has a perfectly proportioned copy of the test pattern master art (or a modified variant with the station ID replacing the Indian-head portrait, such as those used by KRLD-TV,[2] WBAP-TV[3] and WKY-TV[4]) inside, permanently deposited as a carbon image on an aluminum target plate or slide.

Some Pioneer GGV1069 LaserDisc reference discs released for the NTSC market included a variant of the card, but modified with a gray-colored grid and a drawing of a Japanese lion-dog replacing the Indian-head portrait.

[11][12] It was sold as a night-light from 1997 to 2005 by the Archie McPhee company,[13] reminiscent of the times when a fairly common late-night experience was to fall asleep while watching the late movie, only to awaken to the characteristic sine wave tone accompanying the Indian-head test pattern on a black-and-white TV screen.

[14] Nearly all of the hard-to-open, steel-shielded monoscope tubes were junked with their Indian-head test pattern target plates still inside, but many of the board-mounted lithographs survive.

The master art for both the portrait and the pattern design was discovered in a dumpster by a wrecking crew worker as the old RCA factory in Harrison, New Jersey was being demolished in 1970.

This version eschewed the Indian head drawing with the TNT-9 station ID on top, similar to the aforementioned KRLD-TV, WBAP-TV and WKY-TV variants.

The RCA Indian-head test pattern
The Indian Head pattern as mentioned in Ziff Davis 's Radio & Television News trade magazine in January 1949.
Indian Head pattern with its elements labeled, describing the use of each element in aligning a black and white analog TV receiver.
The RCA TK-1C monoscope camera that generated the test pattern
4:3 monochrome pattern resembling the RCA Indian-head extracted from a Philips PM5644 generator of likely European ( PAL ) origin.
Swedish botanist and radio and TV personality Nils Dahlbeck [ sv ] posing in front of the Indian-head test pattern and the Chalmers University of Technology experimental TV station test card [ 19 ] in 1957