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Last Of The Monochrome Cameras: The RCA TK60
The great TK60 actually began as the TK12 and was introduced at the 1960 NAB. the TK12 was RCA’s first new camera design in 8 years and had what would become the “RCA New Look”, blue color for all their TV equipment. Electronically it used the new 4.5″ IO tube. It was restyled at the 1961 NAB with a tally light on top, updated again in 1963 to become the TK60 which had the additional exhaust fan and ‘chimney’ on top just behind the tally.
Thanks, Tom!
The TK-60s were mostly tubes (nuvistors–a highly reliable small metal tube design RCA introduced in 1959), RCA was kind of slow introducing transistors as the early ones tended to be unstable and die suddenly while in use–this changed when RCA got involved in FET development around 1965. The first place where transistors appeared were in the power supplies (I’ve seen TK-41s that were upgraded to solid state power supplies), and the last place tubes were used were in the high voltage rectifiers. (Marconi MK VIIs had a few). IIRC–the TK-42/43 was all-transistor. (Folks, please correct me if you know better.)
Beautiful cameras. Who knows about the electronics? Was the TK60 also the last of RCA’s tube cameras (not counting the IO, of course)?
Looks strangely familiar…
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