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?
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Lenses are constrained by the wavelength of light. That hasn’t changed. Cameras are a little smaller, as sensors have gotten smaller, but shoulders and arms and those ergonomic features are also unchanged. Making things smaller doesn’t actually make them better.
The “thin and light” trend is more focused on consumer products, especially for devices that are meant to be portable and easy to take anywhere.
Industrial grade electronics, such as TV cameras, serve a very different use case. They tend to benefit from having a larger sensor (as that allows absorbing more light, which means a faster shutter speed and less distortion), but that takes up more space. If they’re used in a studio, then they’ll likely be mounted on a tripod where size and weight won’t matter, so it’s beneficial to have more space for electronics, more surface for controls, more room for cooling, etc.
If they’re portable/in-the-field cameras, being large enough to hold on a shoulder allows for better stability than a handheld camera, in addition to the benefits mentioned above.
That said, there are smaller TV cameras available on the market, such as the Blackmagic Studio Camera, where most of the size is composed of a very large viewfinder screen and a small body containing the sensor housing and connections.
The camera itself has gotten smaller. There’s more to a TV camera than just the camera body itself. There’s lenses, mountings, side tools, and other things that make up the whole of a television studio camera. For instance, many have a box on the front that sticks out further at the top and goes down at an angle. That is a teleprompter, which consists of a horizontal monitor and an angled glass which acts as a two-way mirror, allowing the camera to see through while the talent reads their script reflected from the monitor.
TLDR: Television cameras are a system that includes the camera body, and the whole thing is still big.
A camera – specifically the lens – collects light like a bucket collects water. A smaller bucket can’t hold as much water as a larger bucket. Light works the same as it always has, so we still need big lenses/cameras to collect enough light to work.
Depend on witch camera’s your talking about. The portable camera’s for news teams etc absolutely got a lot smaller. The big stationary camera’s not that much. A lot of the size comes from ergonomics, eg you want a decent size focus ring, and a bgi viewfinder for the cameramen, and since its on a wheeled standard, there’s not much benefit in making it smaller anyway
TV cameras are typically used in a studio for hours and hours at a time every single day. They need to be moved around frequently and they need to be solid as a rock so there are no vibrations or unwanted movement.
This leads to heavier and bulkier camera rigs.
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.
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.
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!
Tv camera electronics have gotten smaller, but the form factor has generally stayed the same because it works best for the majority of broadcast uses.
A smaller form factor will be too shaky and produce a poor handheld picture. Smaller lenses will not have space for image stabilization mechanisms resulting in a poor picture in handheld use. Make your sensor too small and it’s not usable in dim or nighttime events-the lens won’t be able to gather enough light to shine on the sensor.
In general, a heavier bulky camera will be more stable than a lighter smaller camera. The larger camera will provide a better, usable picture to show on air.
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