Follow Up…Inside The RCA A500 Iconoscope Camera

A few days back, I posted a rare color photo of the RCA A500 in use in NBC’s Studio 3H in the early 1940s. Here is the patent application diagram that shows the inside of the camera. On the left is the lens housing and on the right, the rear of the camera with it’s dual viewfinder ports.

The reason it had two viewfinder ports was so that when the camera was high, the operator could still see the image. Notice item 65…it’s a flip up mirror that reflects the image to the bottom viewfinder port when needed. With the mirror down, the image comes to the top optical (non electronic) port and with it up, it acts like a periscope.

You can also see the focus mechanism detail and the Iconoscope tube in the middle. This was filed in November of 1936, just three years after electronic television testing began in Studio 3H and at that time, the cameras there were dark colored, but had the same body style. I suspect this is the first patent on the RCA studio cameras (that were different from the field versions), and incorporates updates to the earlier dark cameras. Most likely, this was done in conjunction with the addition of a higher resolution tube which would have either been the jump to 440 or 525 lines from the old 220 line Iconoscope tubes.

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