Welcome to my camera collection! After many years and a great deal of effort, I’ve managed to build a museum-quality collection of the most significant television cameras in the medium’s history. Please take a look around. I hope you’ll enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoy owning them.
This didn’t happen overnight, so here’s how it all came to be.
How I got started
Around age 10 (in 1960), I was totally hooked on drawing television cameras, and I drew them all day long for many years. My favorite was the RCA TK41 (followed by the RCA TK11 and the Norelco PC60). A lady named Kathryn S. Cole at NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza kept me loaded with thick stacks of 8×10 glossy backstage photos for many years. One of them is on our home page and others are scattered around, but all are on the RCA TK 40-41 picture pages.
My first camera, the RCA TK44B, is the start of a very interesting story. Wanting my own TV camera, I called Chuck Pharis in California on August 8, 2006 to ask the best way to go about this. After a good talk with Chuck, I decided that same day to just call around here in my area (Athens/Atlanta) and ask if anyone had any old cameras they’d like to donate to a collector. On my first call, I left a message (which I usually never do), and then got busy with other things and made no more calls.
Later that night, Gary Coffman, an engineer at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, returned my message. He asked if I’d like to have seven cameras, a TD8 HF pedestal, and three miles of cable.
Honest! I swear!
There were five RCA TK44Bs, three RCA TKP 45 portable cameras, and eight CCUs. I kept three TK44s. I gave Chuck two of the 45Ps and gave Paul Beck and Tom Sprague two TK44s, the cable, the CCUs and the other TKP-45 for their Museum of Broadcast Technology just outside Boston.
Tom and Paul gave me a CBS Norelco PC60, a Vinten head from WGBH/Boston, and a tripod that was used by WPIX only on an outfield camera at Yankee Stadium. The TK-44Bs came from Dixie Sports Net, an Atlanta production company that went out of business, but all these cameras had started service at NBC in Burbank.
How do we know? The NBC Burbank cameras had an extra exhaust fan added to the top of the camera. This modification was necessary to keep the viewfinders from overheating and blacking out. This wasn’t a problem for local stations, but network cameras that worked long hours were prone to getting hot inside.
If you go through the TK44 “At Work” picture pages on this site or the Old Radio RCA Equipment website, and look at all the TK44s…aside from the NBC network TK44s, there is only one other TK44 picture that has the extra fan mod on top and that was one from Oral Roberts University. Roberts did a lot of taping at NBC’s Burbank facility and when NBC sold some TK44s and TK45Ps (and they were known to have bought and sold a lot of TK44s), I believe all these cameras went to Oral Roberts University. There are ORU property tags on the lenses.
As for the TK45Ps, I think these were originally used on Saturday Night Live and these NBC New York cameras went to Burbank, then to O.R.U., then Dixie Sports Net, then Gary Coffman, then to me, Chuck and MBT (abbreviation for Museum of Broadcast Technology).
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One of three TK45Ps picked up with the TK 44s. Two TK 45Ps went to Chuck Pharis. 2 TK 44s and 1 TK45P went to the Museum of Broadcast Technology near Boston in Woonsocket RI., (0027) along with all of these camera control units for the TK44s and 45Ps.
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The ‘honeycombing’ in the viewfinder is a typical problem with 44s that have sat for a long time. The resin RCA used between the viewfinder tube and the glass plate on the back of the camera deteriorates and ‘oozes’. It’s a mess but it’s not to hard to clean up. Â TK 44Bs fill the back of a pickup truck. They were heavy and hard to get to with winding stairs and a 50 yard walk to the truck.
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Here they are with the Varitol lenses in my garage after unloading.
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