[RJMiranda]

Well you can say that we still use "early" TV because we are not in HD. We are implementing terrestrial digital SD broadcasting, and in the near future will start some HD programming. But not for now.

We still have just one HD-equiped OB-van. No HD studio cameras (altho some news gathering is made with HD gear set to record in SD, because you can not find SD cameras outside a museum).

It is like in the mid-seventies, when we had just a Nec-made OB-van and it was the only color unit in Cuba. When a program was to be broadcast in color, the truck was parked alongside the studio building, cables run up the stairs to the studio, and the Russian/DuMont/RCA B/W cameras pushed aside.

Cuba had color TV in late fifties, earlier than many countries. Some say that we were second after the US. But it was only one channel that broadcast color movies. They had just a telecine and some say one camera for televising the host between movies. They didn´t made any production of their own. It ended broadcasting soon after the Revolution, for lack of spares.
We kept using US-made B/W cameras well into the seventies. The 4 1/2 inch superorthicons came from the USSR, custom-made for the US cameras.

In the mid-eighties we went fully into color. For many years, most of the cameras were Sony DXC-M3 and M3A. And a Magnolia Soviet-made studio that our engineers transformed from 625-line SECAM into 525-line NTSC. Talk about easy tasks!

The recordings were made mostly in UMatic (until about 2003!) and some Sony C-format. Now we use Beta SP and our main TV archives are in that format.

I keep an archive of independent-made programming from 1988 to mid-2000s, mostly from people working at State-owned facilities but not related to the Cuban TV. Now there are many independent artists that own their own gear, but in the eighties you had to borrow State-owned equipment. Many are very interesting works.

I have the only surviving copy of many of these early works, some even made in VHS by art students that today are known film directors. (At the art school, the equipment was then Super VHS, but they used VHS tapes). And a lot of Umatic tapes that are gradually being converted into digital.