Love Letter To JVC KY-210 - Part 1 

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What was the old title?

Hello

One thing that impressed me about this camera’s design is the aluminum flap that covers the BARS switch. Holy crap, why is this not on every ENG camera? On most, the BARS is completely exposed AND located right next to the Gain and White Balance switches, so it is all to easy to hit BARS by accident when trying to adjust gain or white balance, and totally ruin your shot. It’s such an obvious design flaw, yet Sony and Panasonic continue to make ENG cameras with this flaw even to this day. Drives me crazy. Bravo to JVC for solving this problem back in 1981. Now why didn’t their solution stick??

@@matthewelton7393 Yeah, or what to think of the volume dials on some (many? don't know) modern ENG camera's: usually recessed in the older style camera's to protect against accidental adjustment and accesible by opening a cover that would also provide control to phantom power and such. Nowadays, they're just bare accessible and only feature some idiotic cover that breaks easily, or aren't even covered at all...

"'definitely something to be said for giant panels of switches vs. burying everything in a menu" I love this, thank you for saying it. This type of thing still applies to varying levels in the professional world all over and it's great. My ceph media storage cluster has 1600+ configuration variables :)

oh my god, that's horrifying but unsurprising now that you explain it. phew! i'll keep my wits about me when I get around to taking these things outside.

@@CathodeRayDude I think that pretty much all cameras with motorized irises would also close the iris automatically when you powered down. In any event, that era is why I am still paranoid about lens caps. I also cackle a little when @styropyro burns a CCD with one of his lasers, because just pointing a tube camera at one of his laser DOTS on the wall would likely burn it complete darkness.

@@everlastingphelps Yep, they still do. At least, my JVC's do that. Set the iris to auto and flip the power-switch on the camera to off and you will see the ring on the lens swiftly move to C (= Close) and slowly come to a stop at the C position. As the switch on the camera is a software-switch, I can't think this is something the servo-units themselves dictate (as in: power the servo-unit without a camera attached and remove power to see what happens)

@@CathodeRayDude StyroPyro's video about medical lasers shows that even modern CMOS camera sensors can be damaged when light is waay to intense for the sensor to cope with. Though, in his case, it was from reflected laser beams literally blasting pixels off the surface of the CMOS sensor, so...

Thanks for the firsthand anecdotes! I actually just got a DXC-M3 in working condition so I'll have that in a video at some point - I can believe it could survive that experience given the build quality but that's a good point about the tubes, only so much that glass can handle. I've been thinking about trying to find some monster lights to use these things indoors properly; I have a bunch of tube cameras and none of them can make anything out in my "well-lit" (to my eyes!) studio/office. Thanks again for the comment!

@@CathodeRayDude You should be able to get tungsten lighting kits cheap these days as everyone is switching to LEDs. A basic 3 head kit would be adequate. In work (the BBC) we used to use Sachtler Reporter 300 kits for news & PSC Crews, but they had a major flaw in that if the bulb blew it took out the internal fuse (and sometimes the plug fuse) with it - so I had to always issue replacement fuses along with the bubbles. We've since moved on to LED panels and they are soooo much easier to use on-the-go.

Thank you! It didn't occur to me that the flange focal distance might differ from camera to camera, that absolutely explains why they would do this. And thank you for explaining the black filter - some of my cameras have auto-black that just close the iris all the way, but I'm guessing since the iris isn't always servo'd, this is a more reliable option. I love how pragmatic this equipment is - everything is about "what do we actually *need* to get our jobs done?"

you can still buy a 15mm rod system and build your own shoulder mount but it's Just Not The Same

@@CathodeRayDude The counterweight is what makes the difference though. I'm sticking with my hand-me-down Sony HD-1000 until it gives up the ghost, or I'm forced to move to 4k.

JVC still puts out shoulder-mount cameras for the prosumer market. But it could be other manufacturers are not that keen anymore on those, as the 'get a shitload of accesories before you can call it a camera' cameras are seem to be getting more common.

I'd be very tempted to get a busted shoulder-mount camera whose internals have gone bad and retrofit a modern sensor array into it. It would be an absolute nightmare to get the controls wired up to the controls from the vintage camera body, though, but it would definitely be a wildly educational project to undertake.

@@mndlessdrwer The worst part about that kind of retrofits is that the sensor-block is a part that is adjusted to very, VERY tight specifications/tolerance. Besides that, the lens would most likely not accomodate the new sensor, as it's just not made to handle the far higher resolution compared to a standard PAL/NTSC image. You have more luck converting an old shoulder mount camera by replacing the internals and lens completely with the complete inner-workings of a modern prosumer camera. These will have most of the switches already present on the old camera.

Yep exactly what came to mind immediately

The term for this is "parfocal" and I don't know if it's explicitly re: the back focus though I think I've heard they're connected in some way. It's certainly also a larger mechanical phenomenon vis a vis how the lens moves the optical elements, but yeah, it's supremely cool!

And the weird part about a wrong backfocus is that it looks so completely different than when you just pull focus beyond the subject and have everything blur. For some reason, if you're used to the effect, you can tell whether a defocussed image was done deliberately by pulling focus to close or distant, or someone forgot to adjust the backfocus. I don't use autofocus (hell, both my 1/3" lenses can't even do that and only of my 1/3" camera's utilizes a signal for autofocus with a lens I don't use as it's fully servo-operated instead of fully-mechanical) and it's always funny when you give someone a camera and the first thing they ask is 'how does it focus... because it doesn't ...'

(NiCd)

@@ynda777 Uhuh. NiMh really was used in the AV-industry. Even better, I wouldn't be too surprised if the AV-industry started using them first as they provided such a huge benefit over NiCd's (the memory-effect). My JVC GY-DV500 came with NiCd's, but one could buy far more expensive NiMh's and even more expensive lithium-batteries for them.

And even funnier: in these old units, it's not even a real switch, but a lever that shifts a cog/gear inside that literally decouples the driving motor from the ring. More modern servo-units (Fujinon Digi-power for example) feature micro-switches that are actuated by the same lever, but then electronically disengage the motor.

It's still a thing, but has shifted more to PCB-swapping and FAR more software-investigation. I have the service manual on both my JVC GY-DV500 (a MiniDV beast from 2000) and my JVC GY-HM750, a shoulder mount 3 CCD FHD camera. Where the DV500 already records a shitload of data in internal logs (faults, statuses, temperatures and what not) and communicates between every PCB with a secret JVC-known bus-system, the HM750 is basically a computer with an extensive amount of memory on board to set and save just about anything from manufacturers' calibration data, to user settings, faults, temperatures, fan hours and everything I forgot. The JVC GY-HM850 I also own (3 uncompensated-for-rolling-shutter-CMOS FHD), the successor to the 750, can even communicate with attached and supported lenses to apply Chromatic Abberation Correction (CAC) to the image before it is recorded on the card(s). The controller in the servo-unit has calibration data from that specific lens exposed to test-images burned into it, telling the camera exactly how it performs at its different zoom, focus and iris ranges and applying corrections accordingly. This suddenly makes a rather shitty CAC-compatible lens perform like a top-notch lens. From the mechanical problems magnetic-tape based systems suffered from, it has now gone to more into non-hardware problems. Hell, there's even a port on all cameras mentioned above to just read out the internal fault-memory by computer (and the right software on it...)

Same in audio control systems when you get to the high level. A Digico console costs north of $80,000 but for very good reason. They are built like tanks and to exacting specifications. They can do anything an audio engineer would ever need to do.

I adore this kind of no-holds-barred approach to designing and building electronics. When the manufacturer knows that it'll sell regardless of the price, so they just throw the whole kitchen sink at it to solve whatever use-case is necessary for that product.

Indeed. It's especially that bit which I don't understand about the photocamera-as-videocamera-hype. Yes, they have their advantages (though large-sensor-interchangeable-lens camcorders are so common by now), but when I hear and read about all the problems people encounter (just a few things: grip, battery-life, no power-zoom, 'I can't connect my professional mic...) as they seem to think those photocameras are videocameras, I just can't understand why they didn't just get a videocamera that just does all that, except for (sometimes/mostly) not provide you with the depth of field they want (which, for interviews is usually something you do not want anyway).

The fully closed setting is to protect the image tubes from “burn in” when the camera is unattended. Saticon and Plumbicon tubes could be damaged by being pointed at the sun or even a bright studio light for too long, even if they were powered down. With the camera turned off, it would be easy to accidentally point the camera in the wrong direction and have the sun focused on the tubes. The dark setting in the filter wheel cuts off all the light and protects the tubes.

Oh gosh I forgot about Handy Lookie, I'd heard about it before but I gotta bring it up in some context. I better buy another Ikegami so I have an excuse. I DO have a umatic deck, in working condition!! But I don't have a cable to connect to this camera, so I'm gonna have to wait until I can get another of the same era to do it up right. Thanks for watching!

@@CathodeRayDude Well, thanks to you, I just bid on a Sony DXC-M3, a much less attractive contemporary of your JVC, and one I used to use quite a lot back-inna-day. All you need is 12 volts into the camera, and a BNC cable to take composite out, and feed that into the VTR. You don't need the big umbilical unless you have a portable and need start and stop control from the camera. Also, they did make studio controls and viewfinders for many of those ENG cameras, so you could find that basic camera with full size viewfinder, maybe a bigger (as in light gathering) lens, and tripod (pedestal) mounted controls for zoom, focus, etc.

Almost without a doubt, yes. There are a few videos on here where people have done exactly that. Not sure what to look for - try "nintendo on viewfinder", I'm pretty sure someone did that!

@@CathodeRayDude yeah, I remember seeing an LGR video on that, pretty neat

thank you!!

If I were shooting footage for a flashback in a film or something and it was meant to be set in the era where these kinds of camera sensors were common, I would absolutely want to shoot on one of these instead of faking the effect in post-production. You can never overstate the immersion that you get from authenticity. Especially for the people who grew up watching the news shot on cameras like this. It's like trying to fake the effect you get from a VHS recording. People who lived with VHS will always feel that kind of uncanny valley feeling when someone's faking the effect instead of recording onto film.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if JVC made an adapter plate to pass power and the signal feed from that hidden multi-pin connector to a docking point for a video recorder. For those somewhat infrequent times when they needed to rush someone out to a scene without the ability to get the full camera crew together. Throw some form of tape into a recorder, strap the recorder onto the camera body, and be on your way. Or you could go the umbilical cord route and use a waist or back-mounted video recorder tethered by a cable to the back of the camera.

Go for a JVC GY-DV500 or 5000 or so. That camera was a major hit around the 2000's and is thus sold in quantity on Ebay. As it's fully digital, you'll have less trouble getting a decent output out of it...

@@weeardguy thanks

There will always be a place in my heart for the sense of nostalgia that video recorded on these old cameras can engender. I hope your channel takes off!

Yup! Congratulations, haha, feel free to tell people it's the same one. I just got to a point where I realized I hadn't touched it in 3 or 4 years and it was just taking up space, and I figured if I dropped it off there it would end up in the hands of somebody who wanted it, and wouldn't you look at that, that's just what happened. By the way, I believe it does work, it almost certainly just needs a recap and you'll get a good picture out of it again. As it is, it'll work for about a minute and then the image slowly starts dying

I got the same series camera for years now, I didn't remember where I got it, but it's ky-1900ch model. Was watching your videos and noticed one on your shelf. Now I know that it's not much of a thing😂 I'd used it once as a prop in red bull soap box race and now it's on a shelf too.