Inside The Iconoscope & One Of The First Orthicon Cameras

Revised from the earlier post: In 1941, TV was still quite a novelty, as this clip portrays. At 1:27 in this RCA film “Magic In The Air”, you get a look at one of the first RCA Orthicon cameras and the first ever mobile unit. At 4:22, you get a look inside an RCA 500A Iconoscope camera. Most interesting of all to me is the 7:15 section where the RCA Orthicon camera is put together at the ballpark. The lower half, with the tube, is mounted first and the optical (not electronic) viewfinder is added next. The viewfinder has it’s own lens (matching the taking lens on the bottom element) and is not showing the cameraman the actual image from the Orthicon tube. Seeing the actual tube output will finally come in 1946 when the RCA TK30 Image Orthicon camera is introduced.

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