Camcorders From The 80s
Which is more worthwhile to invest in – Professional tube cameras or consumer level MiniDV camcorders?
As above, is it more worthwhile to invest in professional grade tube cameras from say the mid-80s (which apparently go cheap now?) or simply to invest in consumer level MiniDV camcorders?
Which give better quality for a video production standpoint?
Being a television engineer from the time before CCDs, i can tell you there is many reasons why the tube cameras are obsolete. The part about resolution is not correct, a studio grade tube camera can make resolution of 800 to 1200 TVL which is the equivalent to a CCD array of 1440 pixels, compared to 720 pixels in miniDV. Tubes require continuous attention of gain, gamma and most particularly registration, and require the equivalent of daylight (1000 fc) illumination to make a decent color picture. A tube camera without an engineer/shader will not perform well. Except for Ikegami cameras, registration must be done each day of use. Ike’s are famous for holding regisitration for several days. A tube camera from the 80′s is not a recorder, so you are still stuck with finding a suitable recording format for its analog video output. You could use a Sony DVcam or panasonic DVCpro studio recorder but then you are back to essentially miniDV video.
I occassionally use a Panasonic WV F250 with component video output into a Sony DSR50 DVcam recorder. This is a 3CCD camera with ENG kit and both work with battery power for field shooting. You can’t use a studio tube camera on batteries, they use way too much power. They did make 3 tube field camera that could be shoulder carried, but they were much lower resolution, usually about 500 TVL or nearly the same as miniDV. When Studio cameras were used in the field, it was with a production truck, and they were mounted on heavy duty camera supports, with cables running back to the truck. The only 3 tube camcorders were for the first generation Betacam oxide. These were quickly replaced once Sony got rights to use of CCDs.
the miniDV system itself is a good performer, but consumer cameras generally do not have especially good lenses.
My old early 80s JVC camcorder (Part1)
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