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The computer/electronics industry needs to get off their duffs and get more true 16:9 CCDs made, and made at higher actual resolutions. Many people are now expecting their digital video camera to function also as a digital still camera. That might be asking a bit much for doing both jobs without watering down either video or still work.

One thing that should be a requirement for just about any DV camera, be it consumer or professional, is a 3 CCD array. One single composite CCD just sucks. And they should do 3 CCD arrays for many digital still cameras. I have seen only a handful of digital cameras and large format digital backs utilize 3 CCDs. ALL professional digital video cameras employ 3CCD array systems to process the Red, Green and Blue components of the video signal separately. The color quality and sharpness of the video is always going to turn out better with a 3CCD array than it will with only one single chip trying to do the entire job.

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My last job in TV, after the phase-out of film, was in commercial operations. Had to watch every single commercial that came through the place. Yucck. I also had the fun of loading ACR carts with 2" tape. We had a small machine that wound them to whatever length that we wanted.

Stuff like this kinda burned me out. I left the industry soon after.

Another station that I worked in had an RCA 2" cart machine that ran the carts around a big oval track. Somewhere deep inside it lurked a 2" tape machine. I can still hear the video head running to this day... not constantly, of course!

I have a few 3/4" dubs of 2" video that was made in the late 70's. If I turn up the audio during the silent commercial break slugs, I can faintly hear the whine of the video head. Could possibly bring on a flashback if I listened long enough...

Our local station has a nice S-VHS industrial machine hooked through their switcher in the newsroom. They encourage viewers to bring them their video coverage of "news." Some of it would qualify for one of those funniest video shows on TV. They only ask that the tape you submit be recorded at SP "standard" speed. They still get things at EP, though. These they dont use.

There was a fire on the riverfront here in Asheville 6-7 years ago that devastated 3 blocks of real eatate that was built in the early 1900's.
The station made a video available to the viewers of this fire. Most of the footage was viewer-submitted, with
on-screen credit! I dont think they can do any other consumer formats.

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My first station job ran all spots, and some shows on a threesome of Sony VO-2850 3/4" monsters. Talk about tapes jamming... Downstairs, we recorded the 3/4" tapes off of 2" originals with a pair of VO-2600's.

The station owner bought thousands of used KCA-60 tapes from Studio Tape Exchange in NYC. You saw alot of wrinkles on our air, not to mention TBC errors galore.

When our studio-to-transmitter microwave would die, I would drive the 19 miles with a load of pre-recorded programming to the transmitter site and load them in another 2850 that was there for such an emergency. At least we stayed on the air. You can imagine what our signal looked like.

There was a standing joke at the time:

Tune your TV to a dead UHF channel.

"You are watching Channel 17 on a good day!"

I still have a Sony VO-1200 player, a VO-1600 recorder, (yes, they do still work,)
and a Sony BVU-2008 that I use for the 300 or so master copies that I have.

I dubbed everything to VHS recently. Now, the 3/4" just sits there taking up space.

I believe it was a series of three cards, one was a motion jpeg card, one was a duel monitor card, and the third was a SCSI-2 raid type high speed hard disk interface.

very cool, VERY expensive at the time.. i think he said the system not incuding the mac cost approx $20,000. He still has it, i think.

-sean