I was at an event the other day and the media was there. I noticed that the cameras they were using to record and broadcast the event were just as large and bulky as I remember them being when I was a kid in the 80s. Pretty much everything else technology-wise has become more miniaturized in the past 40 years, but apparently not the TV cameras. Why is that?
In: Technology
First off, there are excellent videos on youtube that explain, in minute detail, why TV cameras are huge and super heavy. I suggest you look them up, but I’ll try to find a great one for you in a minute.
What you need to know is essentially this:
One, the actual camera in the setup, which you can’t see because it’s housed inside a huge, heavy enclosure, is a high-end 4K digital video camera, which pro videographers use outside of the TV business. It’s a camera with swappable lenses, like the Blackmagic Ursa Broadcast. That’s a 4 200$ item, so it’s not the most expensive element in the camera setup.
Two, the zoom on TV cameras is absolutely insane, and far greater than anything used for non-TV work. Fujinon is a major player in the TV camera lens space, and a common model is the Fujinon UA107, which retails for a cool 200 000$ . To put things in perspective relative to a consumer camcorder, it has an optical 107x zoom, 4K-grade optics, and using the embedded extender, offers a 16.8 to 1800mm range, which allows the camera to zoom from your face in front of the camera, to your face in glorious detail two football fields away. And it weighs 52.7 lb / 23.9 kg
Furthermore, this lens’s zoom is insanely fast, allowing the camera operator to be able track minute details across quick-changing distances, something you just can’t do with a normal camera without creating video artifacts.
Three, the tripod and pan-tilt head need to be both extremely heavy-duty, to support a camera, lens, enclosure and controls, weighing in at around 180lb / 90kg. On top of that, they need to be incredibly stable, offer silky smooth operation and be capable of absorbing the camera operator’s mico-movements, for perfect stability of the camera during pan and zoom operations. A head like the Vinten Vector 950 is commonly used.
Lastly, in order to produce the best image quality possible, the camera setup is outfitted with an external monitor and control modules, which allow the operator to adjust image settings on the fly and control the zoom without transferring movement to the lens.
So that’s basically why TV cameras are huge, heavy and insanely expensive: it’s just not possible to miniaturize the components and retain all the required features.
Edit: [here’s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkTaMyatsTo) a great video that explains all of the above. Enjoy!
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