Capehart Farnsworth 461P

[Ampico-kid]

Originally Posted by IsthmusTV

What a cool and unusual set! You did a great job on the restoration-- the picture is awesome

I have to ask, did you shoot the screen shots separately and Photoshop them into the screen mask? If not, you achieved what few of us have, getting the lighting and exposure perfect for both the cabinet and the screen. Very nice!

Congrats and good luck with the cabinet.

-Clark

Photoshop was not used to insert the image into the screen mask. I did freeze the image on screen to try and reduce any motion blur, and then there was a great deal of trial and error using different manual settings on the camera to optimize the exposure. I don't know if I could duplicate the process again if I wanted to....I tried many different combinations of room lighting, screen brightness, and camera settings. Bob

[Electronic M]

The fact you could get that image from only one shot is very impressive....Not only the skill to make that happen, but that the set could make a pic that could be photographed that well.

[David Roper]

No, there has to be some misunderstanding here. Otherwise how could the dark areas of the picture appear black in the photos showing the set operating...while in shots with virtually the same illumination, while turned off the "dark" screen appears very light and reflective?

[Tom Albrecht]

Photographing screen shots is always really tough. The only way to get a truly dark black level in the CRT screen shot is to have the room lights very low, which you'll see in many photos the rest of us post. But then the rest of the set is not very visible. For whatever reason, I also find that in addition to having the lights low, I also generally have to run the set at quite low brightness and contrast as well, or the autoexposure function of the camera gets all confused.

[decojoe67]

Very cool and rare TV. I have a clipping from a Radio Retailing mag. that states that it sold for $645. Now realize that would be like spending about $6,000 today!
Another model at the same time was a tall console that looked the size of a china-cabinet with the CRT way up top! It had a shortwave radio and phono below.
BTW, I too used to think that TV's made in 1948 and onward dropped channel 1, but it's not true. I have a Motorola VT-71 marked "1948" that has channel 1.
Joe

[Ampico-kid]

Whew....you guys are a tough crowd. Let me see if I can straigten this out. I'll refer to the pictures as:

#1 set with doors open, no picture on screen,
#2 doors open long shot of picture on screen
#3 close up of screen.

Picture #1 shows the screen and the mask, which is sort of a mustard yellow color. That's the correct color of the mask. I had a problem getting the screen exposure and the cabinet exposure correct together in Picture #2 . I darkened the room a bit, turned down the brightness of the picture, (played with the camera exposure settings) and took the picture. Everything was pretty dark except for the screen, which was about the right exposure, but the mask now looks green because of the darker exposure. I lightened up the cabinet and room around it, but it's still darker than in pic #1. If you look at the floor in pics #1 and pic#2 you'll see the floor is much darker in pic #2 than in pic#1...that's why.

I kept the room light and exposure on the camera about the same for the close up screen shots, but as Tom Albrecht mentioned, to get a good screen exposure, the brightness level of the crt has to be lowered. It's a hit and miss proposition. I probably have 40 or 50 pictures or more I took at various exposure levels, room light levels, screen brightness levels. It's just trial and error.

My goal is to give an accurate representation of what the picture really looks like on a particular set, no more and no less. I'd extend an open invitation to anyone who'd like to stop by any time and check it out in person.

I'm not going to say the every picture I post is 100% accurate to what the image on the screen looks like...but I do my very best to achieve that.

Hope that sheds some light on all of this.
Thanks.
Bob

PS (I'm sorry this sidetracked the real issue which is that this is a really quirky interestingly different set.)

[Kevin Kuehn]

Thanks for clearing that up. I figured it was shopped too, but no biggie. And so basically you did the reverse of what others have done, with the same basic results. BTW very unique and interesting set you have.

I guess we all need to start putting disclaimers under our screen shots.

[dtvmcdonald]

As to screen photography. I've got Canon 30D and 7D cameras. Using either
its trivial to get good photos of B&W sets. I just use full manual exposure, 1/15 to 1/4 second, (below 1/15 only using static pictures) f/5.6 or smaller, and adjust the ISO to get the correct exposure.

Color is much harder of course. This is because of the moire problem with the Bayer filter on the camera. I either need to fully resolve every dot or stripe, having it
cover at least 4 pixels, or not resolve them at all, setting the camera out of focus
to do the blurring. I'm still learning how to do this. I've tried making panorama
shots using 4 shots per screen with the 7D to get 70 megapixels and it
works nicely but is lots of work and requires lots of Photoshopping.

A Fuji camera with the strange sensor would be interesting to test ... it might be a panacea.