TV History

Keeping the cameramen in Studio 6A on their toes, here’s Chris Farley on Conan from the New York days. Check out the last 40 seconds or so and notice that they (like SNL) are using a sound boom here too. Thanks to ABC camera veteran Howie Zeideman for sharing. By God… 99.9er% of this…

JUST ADDED TO THE COLLECTION! I’m happy to share these first pictures of an Ikegami 377 that I have just added to my collection. The green CBS logos are added as a tribute to 46 year CBS veteran cameraman Dave Dorsett who retired from the David Letterman show in December, 2011. Each camera on…

Water Cooled Studio Lighting…1944 Recently a few discussion questions have popped up…one of them on the GE Mercury Vapor studio lights that were water cooled. Yes, it sounds a bit crazy, but they had them and GE made them. Above is a page from the 1944 GE Catalog that can be found on the…

Finally…A HOT CAMERA! I’m quite happy to finally have a working camera in my collection. This is a Sony BVP 370, the first Sony chip camera and it came from WXIA/WATL in Atlanta complete with rack and monitor. In the video I call it a 360 tube camera, but found out just after I…

Interesting! Sammy opens the show in front of a crane mounted TK41. If you look closely, you see the teleprompter moving on the camera behind him too. Back then, all that had to sync up with cables. Thanks to our friend John Pinto, (who has been a Saturday Night Live cameraman since the start,…

Two True Rarities… Rarity One…the striped banding on the RCA TK11/31s. This was fairly common on the TK10/30 at CBS and this was actually a quick grey scale adjustment for cameras. The TK11/31 handle in front of the grey bars diluted their purpose, so they quit using the bars on the TK11/31 cameras soon…

Thanks to the fabulous RCA TK41s and NBC Burbank crew, here are 2 GREAT back to back Andy Williams Christmas songs. Even as degraded as the online video is, look how brilliant the color and sharp the image! Remember, a lot of this is done with big Houston Fearless 30B cranes and sound booms…

This is the team that came up with the RCA TK 11 – 31. Only known photo of the original engineering team with one of the first TK 11s at Camden plant. Photo from RCA Engineers Digest Nov 1952 donated by RCA Engineer Harry Wright. Source

Here is the one of two very rare lenses donated to the Pavek Museum…this one is a 27 element Zoomar long lens used at CBS Television City (the other lens is in the next post down on this page). Although Steve does not have the full history on these 2 great rarities, this one…

What A Find! Steve Raymer at The Pavek Museum in the Minneapolis area has received some lens donations and this one is a real treasure. This is a very rare Walker Electra Zoom lens. Joe Walker worked with Frank Capra and made and designed special lenses to be used specifically on over 50 of…

Hot off the presses! Here is the 3rd part of Jame O’Neal’s great series on collections and museums! Enjoy and pass it along! https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/keeping-early-television39s-legacy-alive   Source

One more story on Vinten…the great Heron Crane. Take a look! The Vinten Heron – Stories 5 | The Tech-ops History Site The Vinten Heron was a camera crane built to a BBC spec in the early sixties. It was in regular use till the early eighties, and probably did a large part of…

Here’s the official Vinten Timeline on their creations for those of you, like me, that have wondered when what came out. FYI, the Mark III head came in ’58 and the Fulmar pedestal in ’74. Quite interesting…enjoy! https://www.vinten.com/en/about-us/ Source

So glad to see this story on the old equipment and museums! Glad my friends at the MBT in Boston are progressing! Great to see the Steve’s Ohio and Geoff’s W. Virginia museum and collections get some much deserved attention! https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/keeping-early-television39s-legacy-alive ALEXANDRIA, VA.—In this world of handheld HD, 3DTV origination, and flat screen displays,…