Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianSummers
It's quite a hard question to answer. a contender might be the Bosch KCH1000 camera introduced in 1986. The middle/late 1980s was a crossover time for tubes v CCD and at that point tubes offered a better resolution than CCD could do, hence the tubed "HD" KCH1000 camera.
See http://www.tvcameramuseum.org/bosch/.../kch1000p1.htm
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This makes sense and jibes with my memory. Solid state sensors were improving, but had not reached HD resolution quite yet. Tube cameras had to be used for HD. The Saticons were special HD ones with a finer than usual beam. This meant they were also more prone to lag and comet-tailing. Sony sold the tubes to Bosch, but would not sell their low-noise preamps, which were soldered to the faceplate. Bosch had to desolder them and return them to Sony, and solder on their own preamps (a touchy process to avoid damaging the photoconductive layer).
The ones used in the US HDTV tests were branded BTS. The two special models they designed for the Zenith / AT&T progressive scan system cost $800,000 each. [not a typo - eight hundred thousand].