In Preparation For A HUGE Surprise!

Tomorrow, I will be posting a hugely surprising photo…one that I am sure you have never seen. To prepare you, this post is about the CBS/Ikegami partnership on the development of an ENG camera that began around 1961. A year or so back, Dr. Joe Flaherty, who is still a Senior VP of Engineering at CBS told me the story that he was deeply involved in. In a nutshell, CBS wanted an ENG type camera for their remotes and news departments. Ikegami had made some progress in their efforts so CBS decided to team up with them on a development project. There were plans for a cabled and a wireless version but the best progress came on the cabled version and by 1962, CBS had a prototype in the field and you can see it in action below at the McDonald Douglas plant in St. Louis where the Mercury spacecraft was made. By 1964, this camera had a manual zoom lens and a different viewfinder but the camera body stayed about the same. A couple were built for use at the CBS O&O station KMOX in St, Louis and that would be the first station in the nation to have hand held news gathering cameras, but not a lot was made of it as CBS wanted a low profile on their R&D with Ikegami. The network also had a couple that were used occasionally in NYC but mostly they saw action at Cape Canaveral in the early 60s which was a good place for field testing. The b/w photos show the camera in 1962 and the color photo shows the modified version in November of 1966. I think the CBS cameras used small IO tubes, but I’m not sure. RCA had hand held Vidicon cameras that NBC used as far back as 1952 and updated versions in the 60s, but the hand held cameras didn’t really take off till the RCA color version…The TK76 was introduced in 1976. The problem with the late start for the hand helds was the color conversions in 1965. There were some good B/W hand helds but with color newscasts, the images looked out of place.

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