"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article ,
Michael A. Terrell wrote:

People who never worked in the industry have no clue. They generally
used the cheapest imported TV they could find, then bitched about it.
If they ever saw the video from a TK-46 with a set of new Plumbicons on
a $7,000 studio monitor, they would shoot their digital TVs.

Well, yes. But take that same camera outdoors where you haven't got full
control over the lighting... Oh - and what were the pictures like at
switch on, before an hours worth of line-up?


It took about six minutes to set up the camera for the ambient
lighting. The rest of the mechanical and electrical setup was very
stable, usually only requiring annual touchup, or a full setup when
installing new Plumbicons.


Luckily, modern cameras are far more suited to use outside of a studio.


Sure, but they are designed to be used by total idiots. They don't
have the contrast ratio, or other positive characteristics of Plumbicon
cameras. What killed Plumbicons was their size of the camera, and the
$14,000+ price tag on a new set of matched tubes. Use a set of $50,000
lenses on a TK 46 and you'll know what I'm talking about.


Other thing is control room monitors (Grade 1) are designed for close
viewing, so generally in the smaller sizes. Nor have I ever seen a
widescreen CRT with decent geometry and registration. Control room CRTs
even for widescreen were still 4:3, but underscanned, making the small
size even more of an issue.


Our control room used 25 to 30 inch monitors. Underscan was
switchable. A mask was used with lines to show the hot area for cheap,
overscanned TV sets. Tell us, how many US TV stations did you work at
as an engineer? How many state of the art NTSC studios have you built?
How many years of maintaining a commercial US TV station?



--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.