Amazing What You Can See, If You Know What You Are Seeing!

There are some TV secrets hiding in plane sight in this pristine color photo of NBC’s “Miss Color TV”, Marie McNamara.

This is The Colonial Theater, NBC’s first real color studio. Notice that all four prototype cameras are mounted on prototype pan heads. This cradle head model was on the Houston Fearless drawing board, but not yet in production. When testing the “coffin cameras” (see the photo in Comments) in Studio 3H from 1950 till late ’52, the regular friction pan heads were found lacking. HF made one for the coffin cameras and sent it. It worked well and three more were made and shipped, but notice they are quite narrow and were originally designed for black and white cameras. When the TK40s went into production in March of ’54, the head included with those cameras was twice the size of these prototypes.

Notice also, the dark lens turrets on two of these cameras. Amazingly, they are the turrets from the old coffin cameras that were tested at Studio 3H. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

By the way, only 25 TK40s were made. A few months into the run, RCA changed some things, including adding a vented viewfinder and made it the TK41. Vented viewfinders were swapped out on most of the old TK40s, but one in this photo still has the non vented version. I think this is around March ’54.

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