nine formats at true scale — and the frame that kept growing after the carrier stopped
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
The carriers are drawn at one scale. Frames are for the 50 Hz system. A dash means the quantity does not exist: tape has no gigabytes, an analogue signal has no pixels.
Video CD, DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray are four different formats on one and the same disc: 120 mm across, a 15 mm hole. In twenty-two years nothing you could touch about the carrier changed.
The frame over the same span grew 82 times, from 352 × 288 to 3840 × 2160 pixels. What changed was not the shape but the wavelength of the laser and the density of the track — things the eye cannot see.
Before that the carrier changed shape every time: a cassette, a thirty-centimetre disc, a cassette half the size again. The row above shows exactly that — before 1993 the objects differ, after it they are identical.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 7 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
who published each standard, when, what it does to the sound, and how many bits per second it allows
two scales · 1000 and 1024 · why a drive looks smaller
main axis and cross axis · which property belongs to which
10 shapes, and one algorithm drawn with them