LabGuy's World: Vintage B/W Video Cameras

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1976: Videmo 127E - Plumbicon Studio* Camera.
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        (* 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