Rca Tk-41

[John Hafer]

This is a great thread! I just have to jump in here after reading all the posts. I am an old color TV fanatic and have been interested in color broadcast equipment for years. I remember back in 1966 that I could actually tell, by the quality of the color image on our color TV, what brand and model color camera a station had. The TK-42 always had a very grainy and low contrast image. I could not believe how degraded the picture was compared to the TK-41. It was no wonder that NBC refused to use them.

I could also tell GE PE-250, Norelco PC-70 and Marconi MKVIII from their pictures.

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.