LabGuy's World: 1976 Hitachi FP-3030B Single Tube Color Camera New addition! 01.03.31 1976 Hitachi FP-3030B Single Tube Color Camera .         This is one of the very first single vidicon portable color cameras. This camera is rather small by standards of the day and also produced a very high quality color picture for a single tube system. It has a seperate 1-1/2" B/W viefinder and either an internal battery pack or sync generator pack. Full color balance controls are available on the back panel.         The FP-3030 uses a single 1" RGB striped target vidicon. That is to to say that the picture is divided inot fine vertical lines of Red, Green and Blue. These signals are routed to a circuit called the Color Matrix which translates them into three new signals called Y, V & U. The Y signal is essentially the same as an original black and white video signal. It conveys the brightness information contained in the televised scene. The V and U signals are made by subtracting the Red and Blue signals from the Y signal. This has two effects. One is to reduce the energy contained in them and the second is to remove the part of the color signal that is redundant with the brightness. There is no reason to send the same information more than once. That would be inefficient.         By doing this magic with the color signals, it became possible for B/W televisions to recieve color broadcasts and form normal B/W pictures. Likewise, a color TV can recieve a B/W broadcast and make a normal B/W picture as well as a color picture during color transmission.         WANTED: Service and or Operators' manuals for this camera. [HOME]......[MUSEUM OF EXTINCT VIDEO CAMERAS] Last updated: January 06, 2005