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  #16  
Old 03-18-2009, 02:36 AM
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hey good thing you're only into vintage broadcast TV cameras and not into quad tape machines

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  #17  
Old 03-25-2009, 04:36 PM
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GE or Harris??

Hi

Reading this thread with interest, I note the GE PE-250 has a startling resemblance to the Harris gates PE-400 camera.

I am in the process of adding the Harris PE-400 to my museum site at www.tvameramuseum.org ( its not there yet!)

I wondered if anyone had any ideas as to who made it and who is the badge engineer?

regards Brian
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  #18  
Old 03-25-2009, 05:37 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Danger Boy View Post

Back in the mid 80's I used to work for RCA Sarnoff Labs in Princeton NJ, and that's the sort of tape machine we had in our TV signal source control room. About then, we got a new "director" level manager (my boss's boss) and he said, "we're still using a POS like that for this lab?" He authorized about 50 grand for a more modern 1 inch tape machine.
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  #19  
Old 03-25-2009, 05:38 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianSummers View Post
Hi

Reading this thread with interest, I note the GE PE-250 has a startling resemblance to the Harris gates PE-400 camera.

I am in the process of adding the Harris PE-400 to my museum site at www.tvameramuseum.org ( its not there yet!)

I wondered if anyone had any ideas as to who made it and who is the badge engineer?

regards Brian
Brian,

Your Harris-Gates PE-400 sure looks like a rebadged GE PE-250. Probably a bit tougher to find then the GE.

-Steve D.
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  #20  
Old 03-26-2009, 04:29 PM
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Years ago, Harris used to make TV cameras. They purchased the TV camera division from GE. I imagine some of their early ones were just rebadged GE cameras, but they did eventually come up with their own design. Harris stopped making cameras in the early 1980's about the time that all the manufacturers were switching from tube based to solid state imaging devices. I have in my collection a Harris TC-85 studio box camera that was one of the last models they produced. (Mine was used as a test jig at the factory, it never saw any use in an actual studio.) How do I know that? Well about 10 years ago I worked at Harris's Quincy, IL location and bought the camera at an employee sale. One of the interesting things about the TC-85 was that it utilized a microprocessor driven CCU that featured automatic setup and registration by the touch of a button. Even though it had that option, many engineers preferred not to use it and would set up and paint the cameras manually, because the automatic method was hard on the tubes.

Also, I don't remember all the exact details of this, but one of the reasons they abandoned making cameras was that they filed a lawsuit against their imaging tube vendor (Amperex I believe,) stating that the quality of the tubes was below par and not up to the standards to compete with the brand new solid state CCD cameras of the day. The lawsuit primarily focused on the Harris TC-90 cameras, which were a shoulder mount EFP camera. Harris ultimately lost the lawsuit and was forced to recall and destroy all the TC-90's

I will try to post some pictures later of some of the different Harris cameras, as I have some old 35MM slides from the '70's sitting around somewhere. Also, some of they guys who worked in the camera division at Harris back in the day are still there, working in TV transmitter field service, in the repair department, and in various management positions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianSummers View Post
Hi

Reading this thread with interest, I note the GE PE-250 has a startling resemblance to the Harris gates PE-400 camera.

I am in the process of adding the Harris PE-400 to my museum site at www.tvameramuseum.org ( its not there yet!)

I wondered if anyone had any ideas as to who made it and who is the badge engineer?

regards Brian
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  #21  
Old 03-26-2009, 08:35 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by matt_s78mn View Post
Also, I don't remember all the exact details of this, but one of the reasons they abandoned making cameras was that they filed a lawsuit against their imaging tube vendor (Amperex I believe,) stating that the quality of the tubes was below par and not up to the standards to compete with the brand new solid state CCD cameras of the day.
Solid-state sensors essentially either work off the processing line or don't (with some dead pixels, perhaps), and are stable thereafter. Photoconductive tubes are also pretty stable (except for cathode wear-out and maybe gas), but their initial performance also can be variable depending on the manufacturing process. I remember in the 60s or 70s Motorola shutting down their CCTV camera line because the vidicon supplier "lost the recipe." Photo-emissive tubes (image orthicon or iconoscope) were not only variable in production, but unstable in use. RCA's return policy stated that these tubes used cesium and other unstable elements and therefore WOULD have long term variance in performance during use. They strongly implied that they would not take returns unless the customer screamed loud and long.
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  #22  
Old 03-28-2009, 02:26 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by matt_s78mn View Post
Years ago,....
...was forced to recall and destroy all the TC-90's

I will try to post some pictures later of some of the different Harris cameras, as I have some old 35MM slides from the '70's sitting around somewhere. Also, some of they guys who worked in the camera division at Harris back in the day are still there, working in TV transmitter field service, in the repair department, and in various management positions.
HI Matt Thanks for very useful info and I lookforward to seeing your picures. Shame about the TC90s. I have a photocopy of the TC-90 brochure.

regards Brian S
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  #23  
Old 03-28-2009, 09:01 PM
julianburke julianburke is offline
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That Harris PE-400 is certainly a GE product. It doesn't look like the '250, it looks like the '350 with the thumbwheel adjustment on the right side front. "PE400" likely an upgrade of the '350 through Harris. These were good cameras!
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  #24  
Old 03-31-2009, 12:40 PM
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GE or Harris?

Re my earlier posting, I have now uploaded to my site the thumbnails for the Harris Gates pages, no big pictures yet but there is a brochure for the PE-400 and TC-80 for downloading.
http://www.tvcameramuseum.org/harris/harristhumb.htm scroll down the page to find the others.

There is still much to be done on the Harris page. The Harris family of cameras is all but unknown here in England. I need to find some pictures of the other Harris cameras to fill the gaps if anyone can help.

Someone was asking about the GE PE-250 CCU. There is a picture of the CCU in the Harris PE-400 brochure, assuming that they are the same?

Regards Brian S
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  #25  
Old 03-31-2009, 05:53 PM
julianburke julianburke is offline
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I love how Gates touts this GE PE400 Camera as a "lead oxide color camera". Isn't this the same thing as a car battery?
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  #26  
Old 03-31-2009, 07:09 PM
John Hafer John Hafer is offline
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Here are some pictures of GE and Harris live and film cameras. Note that the Live cameras went from the PE-250 to the PE-350 and then the Harris PE-450. (Missing in my pictures is the GE-400)

For the film cameras, there was first the GE PE-24, then the PE-240, and then the Harris PE-245. The PE-24 & PE-240 are 4 tube vidicon cameras.

Also note from the 1965 picture, the 3 tube IO GE PE-25 live color camera that was sold against the RCA TK-41.

I have a box of pictures from RCA, Norelco, GE, and Ampex broadcast equipment photos from the 50s' and 60's. These are just a couple of them. Hope these help in this thead discussion.

John
Attached Images
File Type: jpg GE PE-24.jpg (93.1 KB, 30 views)
File Type: jpg GE PE-240.jpg (66.7 KB, 25 views)
File Type: jpg GE PE-250.jpg (98.2 KB, 26 views)
File Type: jpg GE PE-350.jpg (61.9 KB, 28 views)
File Type: jpg Harris PE-245.jpg (81.0 KB, 31 views)
File Type: jpg Harris PE-400.jpg (88.9 KB, 29 views)

Last edited by John Hafer; 03-31-2009 at 07:18 PM.
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  #27  
Old 04-03-2009, 10:56 AM
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KentTeffeteller KentTeffeteller is offline
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John,

Thanks for explaining the history between GE and Gates/Harris. Just hope the Gates Color TV Cameras weren't "Value Engineered". For the uninitiated, Value Engineering was the watchword at Gates Radio Co. in 1958 when Harris purchased them in radio. We went from reliable, solid 1000 watt AM rigs which lasted many years and were easy on tubes (the old BC1F and BC1J) to the BC1T which would run for 10 days at full power on a set of tubes and then didn't make power the rest of the way. This was when many 250 watt AM stations were increasing power to 1 KW. This explains the nickname Quincy Tin Works!
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  #28  
Old 04-03-2009, 11:30 AM
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I think Harris must have made a little bit of EVERYTHING at one time or another...There was a Harris-Seybold division that made guillotine paper cutters for the printing/packaging industries-We had several, until in the mid-80s they just got so worn out & you couldn't get parts for 'em anymore. We replaced 'em w/ cutters from Heidelberg Eastern.
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  #29  
Old 04-03-2009, 03:44 PM
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Good day Gentlemen,

Just a bit of personal experience with CCD sensors. Late in 1985, Ampex (where i was working back then) sold the entire Betacam range of products.
Sony was afraid of Matsushita, a much bigger company, and sought allies to make Betacam the ENG (Electronic News Gathering) standard. They therefore signed alliances with Ampex (USA), Thomson (France) and Bosch-Fernseh (Germany).

Several times i got frantic calls from customers commenting that their CCD camera had suddenly developed a rash of black or white permanent pixels and were therefore unfit for Broadcast use.

This is how we learned that Sony had in the UK a production line machine which would read the CCDs pixel by pixel, then reprogram a ROM mask which contained all the addresses of the "no good" pixels. This was a duplicate of a machine in the Japan OEM factory, and Sony was pretty "hush-hush" about its existence.

Apparently under certain conditions, heat being one of the them, the ROM would loose its memory and the defective pixels would appear. We would send them the optical prism block containing the 3 x CCDs factory-cemented to it (positioned to half a micron precision in the X/Y/Z directions) and would get it back a couple of weeks later producing again a perfect picture.

It would be interesting to know if the same scheme is still used today or if CCD production techniques have reached such a high level of quality that it is no longer necessary. Personally i think it's still used; getting 1920 x 1080 perfect pixels with a near 100% yield is a tall order to achieve, even today.

and oh by the way, a spare prism with 3 CCD sensors was US $16,000 back then...

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  #30  
Old 04-03-2009, 07:56 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by julianburke View Post
I love how Gates touts this GE PE400 Camera as a "lead oxide color camera". Isn't this the same thing as a car battery?
I presume they used the term "lead oxide" because Plumbicon was a registered trademark of Philips - and they didn't want to pay royalties on the name? (Similar to RCA referring to their videotape models as "television tape" because Ampex trademarked the name "videotape.")

But PE-400 actually came out within the last two years of GE's ownership of the broadcast equipment division (1970), prior to selling that unit to Harris. Here are some web pages with photos which clearly had GE markings on the PE-400, as used throughout the 1970's by Tampa, FL television station WTVT:

http://www.big13.com/Facilities/facilities_cameras.htm
http://www.big13.net/Adrian%20Snow/adrian_snow8.htm

In short, Harris inherited (but did not originate) the PE-400.
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