LabGuy's World:
Vintage B/W Video Cameras
1976: Videmo 127E - Plumbicon Studio* Camera.
.
(* Home made!) I "made
up" this camera! It started out as a simple vidicon security camera. But,
it was already massively over-designed, ridiculously over-built and hideously
over-priced. So, LabGuy improved upon it!
It contains a highly advanced,
for its time, 2:1 interlaced professional quality digital sync generator.
Every electrical adjustment is brought out to the back panel. It took me
a couple of years to figure out what the consequences of wildly tweaking
all of these was!
Next, the chassis is
milled from a solid block of copper, with a little compartment for each
seperate circuit board, then it was all silver plated! After the
circuit boards were installed, the whole thing was then dipped in some
sort of soft plastic goop to fungus / moisture proof it all! The covers
are made of chrome plated sheet steel with the sharpest corners I've ever
seen! It's heavy, at about 12 pounds! With those sharp corners, it would
do serious damage if it were dropped on a toe!
Manufactured in France
by Videmo, it's developer discovered that there is no market for $1200
security cameras! I picked this one up at the bankruptcy auction, brand
new, in 1977 for $200.
Over the years, I have
converted it to use a plumbicon tube. I even kluged on a Hitachi 1-1/2"
CRT viewfinder, salvaged from a dead color camera in 1983! Shown here with
a 16mm cheapo lens, it was still functioning just fine, last time I fired
it up, in 1999!
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Last
Updated: March 16, 2001