OSSC + Hitachi Z31 3 Tube videocamera RGB Sync Test 

Sorry for the late reply, to answer your question - I love the Z31. It blew my mind when I first used it. One of my videos shows some tests I shot in my old studio going straight into a PC's decklink card via composite, and I thought it looked great. RU-vid's compression pretty much removed all trace of checkerboarding from the composite and it looked good. It has a high resolution image and in the right circumstances looks almost filmic. My youtube profile photo is actually a screengrab of some footage I shot with the Z31 and some gelled dedos, but that instance was over RGB. The RGB has great colour detail and it really benefits from a sharp modern lens, not an old cheapie like the one it came with. I have a Sony M3A as well but I kind of destroyed it by trying to power it up with a needlesshigh current power supply and accidentally reversing the polarity (I am a moron). I'd picked the camera up on a job in another state and left all the power connectors etc in that state, so I was desperate to try the camera and screwed up there. I let it go for about 10 seconds while I tried to figure out why it wasn't working and then smelled that sad smell of burning silicon. There is no breaker or fuse in the M3. It still worked but wouldn't run the viewfinder anymore. Ended up using it for a few videos before it started to flake out and died completely. I tried to repair it with some new transistors and components but my soldering wasn't very good at the time. It kind of works now but I need to revisit it and maybe try a different high frequency transistor and re-do the burnt trace.

Hello! Thanks for your interest. I was actually going to write a blog entailing the trials and tribulations I went through trying to get RGB from this camera. Perhaps I still will. Funnily enough I started with a DXC-M3 and CCU-M3 and originally tried to get RGB that way, and it took me some time to learn that Sony offered different two different cables for that camera + CCU combo, one for VTR work and one for RGB monitoring. When I picked up the Z31 for a great price I hooked it up to the CCU-M3 too and was sad to find that it didn't output RGB at all and after looking inside at the connector and what was connected to it, it makes sense. There are only VTR lines, sync and composite connected - no RGB.y I tried to tap into the RGB lines that come off the encoder board inside the camera (and progressively go up in voltage as they go from board to board up to the tube amp side, and it was all in vain as they have a large DC offset and or other issues. Adding capacitors to these didn't change anything so I ended up buying a Kramer video clamper to try and help but then I discovered there is an RGB adapter for the Z31 called the VA-31. This thing connects onto the back of the camera and interfaces through a hidden connector if I remember correctly. I miraculously came across one when I was looking for a tripod plate, and it was infuriating that because of US post it cost twice as much as the heavy tripod plate (which came to Australia from germany!) I couldn't let it go and I'm pleased to report that it works well, although my camera has somewhat different colour and picture compared to composite. I actually prefer the look that composite gives (except that it's noisey, grainier, has less fidelity and is much harder to turn into a HDMI or 1080 picture). My goal for the whole project was to have a portable camera with portable recorder that captured the best possible image, and although I got some really great results with composite going into my Blackmagic decklink card, I could not match this in a portable battery powered operation, as all the portable or dedicated composite converters are pure junk and inherently noisy, whereas the decklink does a much better job. I got excellent results with the OSSC, VA-31 and video assist 5" recording at 576i into ProRes but I haven't done much testing since this video because I was interested in other projects and I was struggling to mount the OSSC and get a reliable BNC-SCART cable. In fact SCART is the crappiest connector in existence, it can be pulled loose very easily which I was annoyed with and I got very sick of trying to roll my own BNC connectors to these crappy cables or bodging in thicker coax into the tiny scart shells. But I'm much better at all of that now and I will attempt it again. If you'd like me to open up my VA-31 and photograph the insides for reverse engineering I'd be more than happy to. I don't believe there was much going on inside the thing.

I'm really glad to hear it! Answered some of your points in another comment, but I thought I'd chime in here. The service manual has come up online a few times but at a ridiculous price. I never bothered with it even though I desperately wanted it. However I did pay some guy to scan his paper copy of the instruction manual and I made it available here: www.manualslib.com/products/Hitachi-Fp-Z31-4188153.html I assume you've probably already seen that. The other hitachi camera, the Z1 may also be very similar in components although I think it's CCD, but probably retains the same RGB encoder stuff. I did learn a great deal about the RGB side of things from the Sony DXC-M3A service manual in which a lot of that and the alignment setup stuff carries across. You should be able to find that online for free, hit me up if you can't as I still have it. It's an absolute tome of hundreds of pages but is a work art.