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
Physics, especially optics.
High quality lenses are large. Lenses with large apertures are big and heavy. Lenses with large zoom ranges are big and heavy. Lenses with calibrated “T-stop” are bigger, heavier and more complex. Lenses with correction for chromatic abberation, are bigger, heavier and more complex. Aspherical elements are expensive, but can make things lighter. Parfocal lenses (i.e. lenses that stay in focus when you zoom) are bigger, heavier, and more complex.
The F-stop you see in conventional lenses is a simple ratio of the focal length with the effective aperture diameter. T-stops take that into account, but also take into account the amount of light absorbed by the physical glass in the lens, as glass isn’t 100% transparent.
Higher resolution recording (HD, 4K or 8K) require larger sensors for similar quality, and larger sensors mean larger, heavier optics in front of them. The ability to record in darker conditions also means larger sensors or bigger lenses.
You can do tricks to get good quality with lesser inputs e.g. bright lighting, computational post-processing, limited choices in field of view, etc, but those come with their own trade-offs and expenses.
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