Best British Colour Camera ?
 

The contenders: Marconi, Link, Pye, EMI, others?

In the sixties & seventies the prolific British camera manufacturers did amazing things with vidicons: Which camera outshone them all ?

Those Sit-coms of the late 60's & 70's sure had some sparkle (who cares about the occasional 'comet-tail' or Philips' ACT, these cameras looked great)

But which one had the edge ?

Your two cents worth ?

Didn't BBC use mostly Link ?

The 4 plumbicon tube EMI 2001 camera introduced in 1966/67 was a very popular choice of camera in Britain the engineers apparently loved this camera. The EMI 2001 was used well into the early 1990s on some programs, one most notably Eastenders which didn't retire the camera till 1991.

Here's an EMI 2001 training video demonstration from 1975 on YouTube in 2 parts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGvO29NQ8xs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIW-EIq4qqo

The bloke conducting the demonstration states that the EMI 2001 is the engineer's camera.

So I dare say EMI 2001 would of probably been the best British camera.

I don't think PYE made any colour cameras apart from the experimental one in the 50s as there is none listed on the TV Camera Museum site:
http://www.tvcameramuseum.org/pye/pye_list.htm

I'm fast becoming a fan of the EMI 2001 - a true classic by the looks of it with four big 30mm vidicons !

The Camera Museum notes admit it had an edge on the later (also excellent) 3-tube 2005 as regarding flesh tones.

A parallel design execution to the RCA TK-42 but, using an image orthicon, the '42 would have had quite a different picture character.

Unfortunately both the '42 and 2001/2005 seemed to have had low production numbers and little export action from their respective countries. (must've been pricey !)

From what I've seen of TK-42 footage eg Alic Cooper on Tubeworks 1971 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHFIVJtqpc and Johnny Winter on Tubeworks 1970 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SeLISb0xyg , having an image orthicon tube as the luminance channel you get lots of haloing on the highlighting like you would on a standard B&W IO camera, apparently TK-42s were deemed as inferior to the TK-41 due to jerky zooming and grainy pictures and a few other design flaws which is why NBC hung onto their 41s till the 44s came in. From those 2 examples of TK-42 footage it looks like the 42s gave TK-44 style pastel pictures with TK-41 style purple halos on the highlights.

Plumbicons, not vidicons. A Philips invention that turned photoconductive tubes from mediocre to excellent. EEV made similar tubes called Leddicons.

BTW, this question could almost start a war. Supporters of EMI and Marconi can be very partisan.

Apparently, the 2001 was marketed under the Thomson name in France with vidicon instead of Plumbicon or Leddicon tubes. There was an attempt to break the 2001 in the USA via IVC, as the IVC/EMI 2001-B (4-tube) or 2001-C (3-tube), but from what I could tell there were almost no takers.

For political reasons (read: please the BBC), EMI cameras' international distribution was very limited, if at all - unlike Marconi, whose Mark VII color cameras were marketed around the world, and more specifically in use at several U.S. TV stations (the cameras were marketed via Ampex in the States). Three of the five CBS O&O's (in Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles) used the Mark VII's starting in 1966. A few public TV stations also used the Mark VII's, as did WFLD Channel 32 in Chicago beginning in 1967, and WNJU Channel 47 in Linden/Newark, NJ for several years starting in the late 1960's.

To check how the quality of the picture from Mark VII's stood at U.S. TV stations, for example, type in "KNXT 1978" in the search engine of YouTube.

I have no partisanship; I recognize different "tube" cameras have their good points, and for the most part can tell which is which by what kind of picture is emanated.

And highlight overloads. Appears like one or more PU tubes might have drifted off focus or optical block/ Zoom tracking problems ? All told the 42 probably a loss generator/headache for RCA.

The 44's did seem pastel favoring yellow ? Some RCA receivers of the 70's & 80's also had the orange/yellow thing going on (could not tweak it out) high output phosphors ? matrix ?

Very intriguing as the BBC had unlimited spending & clout

The brochure on TVcameraMuseum has the Queen's Export Award insiginia at the top, but it must be for EMI in general and not for the cameras.

Potential American buyers must have loved the pictures but balked at the price - thus the 3-tube version proposal.

So why did EMI use 4 (identical?) tubes ? Apparently the thinking in the sixties was that having a separate Y channel would mask registration drift - a problem later solved enabling 3-tube (Model 2005) with stable scan (Op-Amps, Neg feedback...)

The BBC certainly didn't have plenty of money.

Why 4 tubes? 2 main reasons. One is registration, as mentioned above. The other is more subtle relating to gamma and constant luminance. The late Ivan James of EMI was a great proponent of constant luminance and may well have influenced the design. Here's Poynton's view on the subject:
http://www.poynton.com/notes/video/C...luminance.html

Later designs used "highs out of green" and suchlike, recognising that green is a reasonable proxy for luminance.

Besides EMI and Marconi, the four-tube concept (as laid out here) was also applied by U.S. maker General Electric on their PE-250, PE-350 and PE-400 studio cameras; as well as by RCA (not as successfully, as described above) on their infamous TK-42 and TK-43 cameras. And of course, on the two American companies' respective film chain cameras (G.E. PE-24/240/245 and RCA TK-27).

The later attribute (on three-tube cameras), I've noticed was referred to as "contours out of green."

Yipes - those must have been real dogs - poor sensitivity, smear, bad color (weak greens due to having the vidicon non-linearity prior to electrical matrixing).

Four-tube cameras are good for getting a good monochrome picture, and for getting good detail in the color picture (eliminating loss of detail due to misregistration). BUT, the color will never be as true as a three-tube camera unless the low-frequency luminance is derived from the three color plumbicons (because Y = L^(1/gamma) is not the same quantity as Y= .3R^(1/gamma) + .59G^(1/gamma) + .11B^(1/gamma).

RCA published a paper showing that the color errors were not too bad, but nevertheless, the tendency would be to lighten saturated reds and blues on a normal NTSC receiver. This could be compensated somewhat by deliberately pulling the blacks lower in the luminance tube channel I suppose (or by modifying the luma tube optics to favor green), but the three tube camera by comparison could have more accurate color.

Interesting background. Always appreciate your insights.

I'm surprised by the plurality of four tube designs

Thanks for the added illuminating information.