Lucien Biberman - Böcker

As this book took form, its contents furnished the material for a graduate course at the University of Rhode Island. Toward the end of that course, the class reviewed the literature on display characteristics and design. The universal criticism voiced in those reviews was that there was lots of hardware information but no criteria upon which one could base a sound design. Though one could learn all about the size and brightness of various displays, one could not form any judgment about how ef­ fectively the display transferred information to an observer. As I reviewed our nearly completed text, an announcement crossed my desk stating that one of the professional societies in a seminar was to consider if one should not attempt to formulate a theory concerning information transfer from displays to an observer. That was the first title chosen for our book, before our publisher told us that "that was a paragraph, not a title. " The group of contributors to this book have labored long in the conviction that there was a real need to develop and present a consolidated theory based upon the work of a number of pioneers, including Barnes and Czerny, de Vries, Rose, Coltman and Anderson, Schade, Johnson, van Meeteren, and others, who established the various parts of a substantial theoretical and experimental back­ ground that seemed ripe for consolidation.

The past decade has seen a major resurgence in optical research and the teaching of optics in the major universities both in this country and abroad. Electrooptical devices have become achallenging subject of study that has penetrated both the electrical engineering and the physics departments of most major schools. There seems to be something about the laser that has appealed to both the practical electrical engineer with a hankering for fundamental research and to the fundamental physicist with a hankering to be practical. Somehow or other, this same form of enthusiasm has not previously existed in the study of photoelectronic devices that form images. This field of endeavor is becoming more and more sophisticated as newer forms of solid-state devices enter the field, not only in the data-processing end, but in the conversion of radiant energy into electrical charge patterns that are stored, manipulated, and read out in a way that a decade ago would have been considered beyond some fundamental limit or other.