The biggest Nipkow disk.

[Viewmaster]

What diameter and where was the biggest Nipkow disc ever made I wonder?........and the smallest?
Albert.

[DrZarkov]

the smalles I think was made of a CD, but in modern electronic microscopes there are Nipkow-discs in use, I don't know how big they are, but I guess extremly small.

The biggest disc were used for scanning movies in the late 1930th for the british 405 or the german 441 line systems. I don't know the BBC-scanners, but in Germany the used a system of three discs to reduce space of the necessary disc. Still the discs were so big, that they had to put them into a vacuum to let it run smoother and to avoid the noise the synch-holes would make rotating so fast.

[Stephen]

The largest optical scanning element of which I am aware is the lens disc that Ulises Sanabria used in his theatre projection display system in the early 1930s. This lens disc was 45 inches in diameter and two inches thick, mounting 45 lenses each three inches in diameter. It weighed 120 pounds. See http://www.televisionexperimenters.com/sanabria.html for details.

Technically, a lens disc is not a Nipkow disc because a Nipkow disc only has apertures. John Logie Baird invented the lens disc with a spiral arrangement of lenses as shown in his British Patent 230,576, filed 29 December 1923. This patent is in the "Patents and Articles" section of this forum for reference.

[Viewmaster]

The largest optical scanning element of which I am aware is the lens disc that Ulises Sanabria used in his theatre projection display system in the early 1930s. This lens disc was 45 inches in diameter and two inches thick, mounting 45 lenses each three inches in diameter. It weighed 120 pounds. See http://www.televisionexperimenters.com/sanabria.html for details.

Thanks for link. Some nice classy cabinets shown there too.
...any advance on 45 inch diameter I wonder?
I didn't know that Nipkows were used in microscopes either.
Albert.

[Steve Anderson]

Gents,

A few years ago I use a very small motor and a 'derivitive' of the discs we use in an application, see pic. The wheel was 11mm in diameter, this can be compared to the green PCB seen edgewise in the pic at 1.6mm thick.

Steve A.