Scoring Devices and Game Shows

Because the scoring devices and visual displays associated with game shows become ever more sophisticated there is little need these days to construct anything more than the desks or stands to put them in. The range of indicators installed in sports stadia, railway stations, airport lounges and so on ensures that almost any type of display can be obtained from specialist contractors.

The visual display unit

The VDU or television monitor is now a commonplace item and can be used to relay information from the control area to the contestants’ desks. Used as an indicator to be seen by the audience it can display scores fed to it from a computer or from a slave camera looking at some specially constructed game-board device.

The advantage of using a VDU is that its input can be fed into the transmission circuit and shown as a close-up picture. Furthermore it can display alternative material (such as the name of the show) while the scores aren’t being used.

Slide projectors

The complex arrangements of some game-boards call for extraordinary set-ups to display the information. Several popular programmes use whole banks of slide projectors focused on to screens that are relayed by fixed cameras. Such arrangements are necessary where chequer-board patterns change colours or give different information within the same areas. The automatic slide-changing mechanism can be used to switch the lights.

Computer generation

Computer-generated patterns for game-boards allow all sorts of designs and animations to be screened. Fed into the transmission network they can fill the screen, but occasionally the limiting size of the TV monitor makes it too small to be used on the set itself. In such circumstances there could be two solutions. One would be to use an area of blue screen for chroma-key insertion (although this will not be seen either by the competitors or the studio audience), while another would be to use an Eideophor projector to furnish a much bigger picture.