That's It...I'm going back to film

[oolic]

Interesting. I worked for Ampex in Colorado Springs back in the '60s, where they made video tape machines.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29981843/

Richard

[dalethorn]

Interesting. I worked for Ampex in Colorado Springs back in the '60s, where they made video tape machines.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29981843/
Richard

Knowing NASA's relationship to national security, I wouldn't expect a totally accurate picto-map of the moon. If a large asteroid were going to pass within 50,000 miles of Earth, we wouldn't get NASA's photos until 3 months later.

[John.Murray]

Wow!  Those machines generated amazing quality for the time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z7ZAZDgiMg

[OldRoy]

Ah, Ampex...
Now my mind spins back to the halcyon days of analog video. Not quite as far as the Image Orthicon cameras, but certainly 2" helical scan VTRs, not to mention C and B formats (B format!) The days when a degree of expertise with vacuum pumps was a useful attribute for a VT engineer... The days when the Plumbicon tube ruled and it took 15 minutes every time you fired a camera up to get the tube outputs into approximate registration (Sony 300 and 330s were my particular favourites.) RCA TK 76! The camera that caught the asssasination of Anwar Sadat as I recall: ABC news probably never had a bigger scoop - I can remember the near hysterical glee in their London engineering dept. These were the days when a 4 line digital TBC (with an A>D converter the size of a Mars bar) cost about £8K. I remember being showed the prototype of a 6-bit framestore that was going on the market for an affordable £5K and scarcely being able to believe it. It was a piece of cr@p of course...

Er, sorry about all that.
Roy