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
If you look at [this camera](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicstudiocamera), it’s a pretty compact little thing, but you’ll notice that almost every single bit of the outside shell is part of the interface in one way or another: ports to connect other things, buttons, knobs, touch screen, handles… While you could make it even smaller, ([Blackmagic has some absolutely tiny cameras](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicmicrostudiocamera)), that comes at the cost of having barely any control surfaces at all.
Then there’s a common problem with smaller cameras [like this](https://www.sony.co.uk/interchangeable-lens-cameras/products/ilce-7sm3), which is that [they tend to overheat](https://www.reddit.com/r/A7siii/comments/nuw192/sony_a7siii_overheating_incredibly_fast/), so you need enough space to fit heatsinks and fans to minimise that. You also just want a great big chunk of metal that can soak up a bunch of heat to make it easier to manage.
Ultimately, TV cameras aren’t things that you move around very much, and are usually mounted on tripods, so being smaller isn’t _that_ much of an advantage. In fact, for professional uses where you want fine-grained control, being bigger and heavier is often an advantage, to the point that systems like [Steadicam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steadicam) are deliberately quite heavy, to combat camera operators making small movements.
In between needing space for control surfaces and heat dissipation and enough weight for head management and image stability, and there being very limited advantages to having smaller and lighter cameras, there’s just very little reason to move camera design in that direction.
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