Looking for a good vidicon camera on the market for a film project

Right now, I am at the beginning stages of producing a short film that heavily involves the kinescope look of the 1950s and 60s. I already

have a plan set up to shoot my footage in B&W and take it into Adobe Premiere to fiddle with the contrast, apply film grain, and apply the

image orthicon halo effect. The key component for me is to film that rendered footage on a separate vidicon camera (be it a television

camera or CCTV camera) and screen to achieve the true kinescope look.

 

The one downside is that I'm finding it very hard to look for a good vidicon cameras on EBay to complete the look, and there's no use

trying to find one through retail since vidicon tube technology is few and far between in major stores. My last guess is to try my hand at

CCTV cameras that shoot in B&W, otherwise I'm done for. Does anyone know about any cameras that still employ the vidicon tube or

something that achieves a similar look?

<p>I have quite a few tube cameras in perfect working condition, they are from the 1970's mostly, so are single vidicon tube cameras, colour cameras, also some from the 1980's. as i like the artefact effects you can get with them..</p>

<p>the big problem is to find a new source of power to power them up....it needs to be a 12v ac power supply of some kind....which will have enough power to power the camera and portable VCR..I did quite alot of research and tried different ways, mostly with no luck...</p>

<p>but i keep trying..</p>

<p>Pontus Wallstén</p>

<p>I have an old Sony ENG Vidicon camera paired with a U-Matic portable recorder.</p>

<p>It's actually surprising how clean the camera signal is through its direct monitor output or into a modern video capture device. What makes the appearance grungy is the magnetic media and its record/playback, but even 70s or 80s vintage gear will probably be too clean for the look you're after. </p>

<p>I suspect an old B/W CCTV camera will serve adequately as a substitute and look more toward the monitor/TV for the desired characteristics. </p>

<p>A "vidicon" camera is a video camera that uses a vidicon tube to create the image rather than a chip. You won't find one in a store (unless it's a used video equipment store) because they haven't been made in probably 20 years or more since chips replaced tubes in video cameras.<br /><br />But even if you find one, that's not how kinescopes worked.<br /><br />In a kinescope, the live television image was shown on a cathode ray tube (CRT) television monitor. A movie camera was pointed at it and photographed the image onto film. The film was then developed and shown through a telecine projector pointed into a television camera, which could have had a vidicon tube or earlier maybe an image orthicon tube. The signal from that went out onto the air.<br /><br />All you really need to do is futz up the picture in software. No need for a camera.</p>

<p>Assuming you want to recreate the look of 1950s-'60s video, the tricky bit to emulate digitally would be the image persistence and comet tails/trailing artifacts.*</p>

<p>The characteristic kinescope image degradation could easily be handled with most digital video recorded off the screen. Fiddle around a bit with b&w tone settings, contrast, etc. Maybe even decrease sharpness and increase ISO a bit to fuzz up the image and minimize scan lines and artifacts. I've dabbled with recording old movies off the TV, mostly for experimental collages. My Fuji X-A1 video is much too good - there's no way to degrade video quality in camera enough to minimize scan lines. But my Nikon V1 has more versatile b&w settings, including filters, sharpness, etc. And at high ISOs the V1 video is very noisy, with the red filter emulating film grain pretty convincingly. So the effect of emulating a kinescope effect is better with a worse camera, without having to mess with post production video techniques.</p>

<p>*Possibly interesting or boring anecdote: One reason flash photography was eliminated from ringside was the persistent afterglow on TV broadcasts - it wasn't because the boxers complained. I was an amateur boxer when flash photography was still permitted at ringside and I never even noticed the cameras - and I've never met a boxer who complained about flash photography. But the ringside lights were terrible for still photography, so boxing photography suffered badly during the 1960s, other than for a few world championship bouts in the middle to heavyweight divisions where the lights were better. By the time video camera technology improved enough by the 1970s to eliminate the persistence and comet tails, faster color films were available and flash photography never returned to boxing journalism.</p>

<p>I looked back in my archives, and found this e mail from Richard Diehl in the USA, which i had alot of correspondance with regarding tube cameras. I found this e mail very informative :</p>

<p>"There are several types of tube cameras. The purple streaking on scene highlights is <br /> indicative of plumbicon 3 tube <br /> cameras. If the beam current is not high enough, in a particular tube, the photo target <br /> can not fully recharge when it is scanned. This leads to a charged area, in the picture, that is over lit will eventually decay to zero until the offending light is removed or the beam current is raised. <br /> <br /> Other cameras that have this effect are of the 3 tube image orthicon type. However, I am unaware of a single operating color orthicon camera anywhere. <br /> <br /> The last type <br /> of camera, like the QC-54 and Betamax (Trinicon tube) cameras use variations of the <br /> vidicon. Like the newvicon and saticon. These produce hideous color artifacts. Not because of the tube itself. But, because of the <br /> horrible color striped filter system used in these. A vidicon used in BW has an image lag property. <br /> It is similar to the effect I mentioned for plumbicons. This can effect the color filtering and produce lagging green and purple trails. <br /> But, the severity depends on the camera. The effect is worst in low light. "</p>

<p>we also discussed black and white tube cameras of teh 50's..i will dig around for that e mail too..</p>

<p>Pontus</p>

<p>here is some more info from Richard regarding black and white cameras, and also colour cameras that where used in the first colour TV broadcast in 1958 with president Eisenhower, :<br>

( <a href="

)</p>

<p>"The most likely cameras to have been used in that early color broadcast would be RCA TK-31 portable image orthicon cameras and the color cameras are most likely RCA TK-40s. The TK-40s used three 3 inch image orthicon tubes in the classic RGB arrangement using dichroic mirrors to split the light into red, green and blue. In the early part of the program, you can clearly see the nonliearity of the horizontal scan coils. That means that an object will be a slightly different width if it is right or left of center. You can see the image compressing on the left side of the image. The home TVs of the time were no better and no one really noticed or cared. It was amazing that the things worked at all! <br /><br /> Here is a TK-11/31. It was "31" when used in the field and was an "11" when used in a studio. The two cameras had different support equipment. <http://www.big13.net/Facilities/TK%2011%20and%20Lynn%20Stuart%20Horner.jpg> <br /><br /> Here is the color camera or one very much like it. These were the size of a coffin and that was their nick name. "The Coffin", because the earliest models were painted black. <br /><http://www.pharis-video.com/rca-tk~1.jpg><br /><br /> You might find a complete camera chain somewhere. but, be prepared to spend around ten thousand for a complete BW camera. The color cameras are impossible to acquire. The owners will never sell them. Because a "camera chain" consisted of the camera head, a huge fat cable, a separate power supply, separate sync generator, a separate monitor/operator console and more, these are extremely hard to set up and use. Plus, if you found the complete system, it will absolutely need to be rebuilt from top to bottom. Not easy as the parts are getting very hard to find. Complete camera chains are very rare. Most collectors took only the camera head and ignored the rest of the system. "<br />Rich <br /><br /></p>