creating a CCD vidicon colour image

[Aussie Bloke]

G'day all.

I had a crazy idea in my head I thought I'd give a go and that is to create an image with the combination of old and new video camera technology, so I decided to create a colour image with vidicon luminance and CCD chroma. What I did was is point my cameras at a colourful picture on my computer screen (I chose the rainbow lorikeet), firstly my 1974 Sony AVC-3250CE B&W vidicon camera, then my 1991 Panasonic NV-MS1 Super VHS CCD camcorder, then I took a video still from each image, straightened them up and resized them in Corel Photopaint. Then I lowered the brightness and contrast of the CCD image considerably to remove as much luminance as possible but leaving the chroma, and then I overlayed the dark CCD image with the vidicon image and set the overlay mode to "add" which the vidicon luminance becomes the luminance for the CCD chroma image and voila, the resulting image is a bright vidicon CCD colour picture with vidicon luminance and CCD chroma. I was expecting that the dimensions of the images would be out considerably and would not line up perfectly when overlaying but to my surprise when overlaying the image the images were almost perfect and the misalignment was only slight. I have attached a couple of images below briefly illustrating this experiment.

This experiment has come from my idea of converting a B&W tube camera (vidicon, image orthicon, iconoscope etc.) into a colour camera which the B&W tube is the luminance and the CCD chip picks up the chroma and there being mirrors to split the light to both the tube and the CCD and the two video signals get added together creating a tube style colour image. It might be an easier way to convert a B&W camera to colour than use 3 or more tubes. This is one of my crazy ideas I felt I had to share with you.