Charles Poynton graduated with a degree in Mathematics from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Subsequently, he studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. He was invited to become a faculty member at OCA; he taught electronics to art students, and learned about video. 

From 1981 to 1988, Mr. Poynton was proprietor of Poynton Vector Corporation; he and his colleagues designed and built the digital video equipment used at NASA's Johnson Space Center to convert video from the Space Shuttle into NTSC for recording and distribution. 

While at Sun Microsystems in California, from 1988 to 1995, he initiated Sun's HDTV research project, and introduced color management technology to Sun.

He has contributed to many SMPTE and ITU-R standards, including Rec. 601, SMPTE RP 145, SMPTE 170M, and Rec. 709. He was the document editor for SMPTE 274M, the foundation for all of SMPTE's HDTV studio standards. He has organized and presented many popular courses and seminars, including "HDTV Technology" at SIGGRAPH 91, "Concepts of Color, Video, and Compression" at SIGGRAPH 93, and color technology courses at SIGGRAPHs from 1994 through 2000. 

Poynton's book, "A Technical Introduction to Digital Video," was published in 1996, and was reprinted five times. His second book, "Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms and Interfaces," was published in January, 2003 by Morgan Kaufmann, and in February was the 3,339-th most popular item at Amazon.com. 

He now works as an independent contractor, specializing in the physics, mathematics, and engineering of digital color imaging systems, including digital video, HDTV, and digital cinema (D-cinema). 

Poynton is a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and in 1994 was awarded the Society's David Sarnoff Gold Medal for his work to integrate video technology with computing and communications, including his work to establish square pixels as the basis for HDTV standards.