Quote:
Originally Posted by John Hafer
Another interesting point is that back in 1965 RCA came out with a color film camera version of the TK-42. It was the TK-27 and also used 4 tubes, (in this case 1" for Red, Green, Blue, and 1 1/2" for luminance vs the 4 1/2" IO luminance tube in the TK-42). This film camera replaced the outstanding TK-26 (3V color) camera. The TK-26 was the color film camera used with the TK-41 live color camera.
Again, I could tell from watching a film if the station had TK-26 or TK-27 color film cameras. The TK-26 gave a snappy crisp color picture while the TK-27 made all films look low contrast, and grainy.
I remember back in the fall of 1964 watching the show 'Flipper' and how beautiful the color always looked. Then starting in the summer of 1965, the show all of a sudden had poor contrast, and a grainy image. The deep blues of the water lacked contrast. A few other NBC shows also suddenly started looking that way. I thought something had happened to our TV but later I realized that NBC must have installed at least one TK-27 and was using it for some of their color film broadcasts. Not sure if they pulled the camera later on or not, but the older tube TK-26 produced such a better picture than the "New Look" transistorized TK-27. I bet NBC felt the same about the TK-27 as they did about the TK42.
I read that ABC and CBS both installed GE PE-24 4V color film cameras for their network broadcasting.
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Dennis Degan took
photos of NBC's setup at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York during the mid-to-late 1970's, and they had banks of TK-27 film chains. That might give you a hint as to NBC's attitudes towards the TK-27.
Ed Reitan's color TV site mentioned that at least one ABC studio (their Prospect and Talmadge studios in Hollywood), as of the mid-1960's, had had TK-26 film chains, then got TK-27's whose performance had the exact same issues you spoke of, and reverted to the TK-26's thereafter.
It also seemed that on replications of slides, the reds on occasion looked rather weak when compared with the earlier TK-26's - never mind GE's PE-24 (and later PE-240) film chains. I wonder if you could tell by quality which stations used GE PE-24's vs. which ones used the TK-27.
Norelco (of PC-70 fame) had their own film chain, PCF-701 (which used - surprise, surprise! - 3 Plumbicons), but would anyone know which stations, if any, used that particular machine?