G'day all.
I've been doing a lot of work on my homemade RCA 1846 Iconoscope TV camera in the past 2 months and have improved the picture quality significantly since the camera first outputted video!
Firstly I was kindly donated a spare proper deflection yoke for my RCA 1846 tube by WWII military TV camera collector Maurice Schechter
http://www.qsl.net/w2vtm/mil_television_history.html and I replaced the vidicon yoke with it and fired it up and got a better picture but it was more horizontally stretched. I realized that there wasn't enough current going to the horizontal coils and the beam was scanning a narrow horizontal area of the tube's plate so I lowered the resistance between the +15V rail and the horizontal drive section of the deflection board to increase current, had to of course use higher wattage resistors and pot, and voila the beam now scans the full width of the tube's plate and more!
Then the next step was to straighten the picture and reduce the noise so I rotated the yoke and the tube a bit to straighten the picture and then I positioned the video board as close as possible to the tube and cut the target lead much shorter. Then I wrapped aluminium foil around the tube and connected the foil to the camera's chassis, this worked nicely and I now have almost noiseless pictures!
I have also enclosed the camera with the tower case cover and plastic front/rear paneling and lots of gaffer tape around the lens carriage to prevent as much unwanted light to the tube as possible. So now the camera is working so much better and is more practical for usage and I've made a load of videos from the camera and have uploaded them to YouTube. Here's are the links to the more interesting videos made from the camera where the pictures are very watchable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p_Fq1mNKmY (myself talking in front of camera)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQyzVEQI1p4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr-6QBA9WMEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF-2DW5Tzsghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7um0czG9uAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBqtQ2dDNncI also have successfully made some tri-chrome colour video stills of still objects by placing red/green/blue filters in front of the lens and adding them on top of each other in Photoshop, see attached pictures. So back in the 30s/40s it was possible to make a three Iconoscope tube colour camera like a RCA TK-40/41 in the 50s or single tube with spinning colour wheel!
I am yet to update my site on my camera but intend to within the next few days,
A lot of work is still needed on the camera for it to make a really good picture, the camera needs the following:
horizontal/vertical centering
keystone correction
blanking
shading correction
A lens with better depth of field (still using magnifying glasses at present)
Richard Diehl of
http://www.labguysworld.com/ has helped me out so much with my camera so I owe a lot of credit to him. He in recent times has successfully restored his bomber camera to working condition and has made a couple of off-screen video recordings and the picture is fantastic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osnzoSXKzg0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-EeZ6sDzwwhttp://www.labguysworld.com/RCA_CRV-59A ... ration.htmhttp://www.labguysworld.com/RCA_CRV-59A ... ation2.htmhttp://www.labguysworld.com/RCA_CRV-59A ... ation3.htmSo that's the latest on my camera and I am stoked at how good the pictures are looking now and getting a taste of how television pictures looked in the 30s/40s!
Have attached some images of my camera in its more completed form along with video stills from my video recordings.