Sony AV-3400 / AVC-3400 service manual

[Radioiron]

I acquired a Sony AV-3400 Portapac System. It didn't have a power supply so I had to build one. I eventually got It working pretty well, but lately its gotten very wonky. The image in the camera viewfinder is compressed vertically and the playback from the tape isn't that great and has some problems with horizontal streaks through the image.
I was going to put it on the bench and start with the camera and adjust it back to specs and make sure it doesn't have any component problems, but unfortunately none of the pots are labeled with what they control. Would anyone have the schematic or service manual for the camera and VTR?

[RJMiranda]

Good luck with the manual. I think you can find it somewhere online.
Never try to run your camera from 12V alone for testing! It will get no sync and I am not sure if they have protection against a non-sync condition.
You know, EIAJ-1 VTRS used to send sync signals to the cameras so they didn´t had to have internal sync generators. The vertical pulse was shaped from a PG coil in the head drum base. As the head drum did turn 30 times a second, two rotating pole pieces generated two pulses per revolution, and there you had the vertical sync.
For the horizontal sync, there was a gear-like disc also below the drum. It had 525 little projections that passed near another PG-coil. So you had 525 horizontal pulses for every two fields.
Of course this gave you the 15,750 Hz H-sync and 60 Hz V-sync used in the black-and-white world (these values are a little off in color, but this is another story). It was non-interlaced scanning, because the sync signal lacked pre/equalizing and post-equalizing pulses every decent sync generator should supply, and it caused some loss of vertical definition. But the cameras of the era had very bad definition anyway, and the point was not to put a sync generator in the camera, in the first place.
The little power supplies (CMA-1 and the like) Sony had for these cameras shaped the vertical sync from the AC line, and for the horizontal sync had free-running oscillators working in the remote neighbourhood of the approximate third half-cousin of the horizontal frequency.

[centralradio]

Labguy has manuals on his site.


http://www.labguysworld.com/LiteratureForSale.htm