This past weekend I picked up a small television camera locally. It's a Concord TCM-50. It is supposed to have come from a local TV station. Could someone give me some background on these? So far, from what I've been able to dig up online it would appear that it uses a 1" vidicon tube and was made in the late 60's...is this correct? Is the video connector a standard N-type?

So far, it seems to function just fine. I had to remove the housing on the Concord-branded Fujinon zoom because the zoom was stuck..but that's fixed now. I've not actually opened up the camera housing itself.

Thanks

Found one on labguy's site, dated 1968:
http://www.labguysworld.com/Concord_TCM-50.htm

As he says, vidicon cameras were used mainly in small operations such as school and corporate studios. This is definitely a higher end, studio-type vidicon unit due to the built-in viewfinder, which industrial cameras would not have.

Thanks for the link. That's actually where I found what little info I have on the camera. Here's a picture of it operating.

Jeff

Here's a handheld picture of the output from the TCM-50 shown on a 1984 Zenith ZVW-135 composite/RGB computer monitor. Stable image but plenty of ghosting with any movement.

Jeff

The "ghosting" is a feature of vidicons, more, a lot more, light will help.