The TV camera: Past, present and future
Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Spring Suptic
What these smaller cameras offer, according to Pittman, is a far more intimate approach. The small DV cameras are less intrusive. He sees this change as a small part of the overall changes happening to local news, yet he's reluctant to give up his full-sized XD camera. Having to go into the menus to tweak one little thing on the DV camera bothers him.
“I know my job's not going to get any easier,” Pittman says.
But he's also looking forward to a more organic approach to news. A more organic approach is a friendly way of saying one-man-band journalism, something Pittman knows about. He currently works as a solo photographer, creating his own packages for someone else to voice, and he's grooming other photographers to be able to do the same.
“We're operating in an environment where one person is doing it all,” Braverman says. “That's changed the demand in the industry for that equipment. The demand is now for equipment that can do it all without a lot of expertise.”
Today, the skills required have changed.
“We will never go back to an era of specialization,” Braverman says. “It's just the economics and the fact that the broadcast market is so fragmented. Viewers have many, many choices. It's not just the three big networks. Today you have hundreds of choices on cable and satellite, and on top of all that the Internet — all working against the specialization that we once knew.”
The full-dimensional future
So where do we go from here? The experts agree that they foresee no great leaps.
“I hate to say it, but we're reaching the point of diminishing returns,” Luff says.
Optical science, for example, is reaching the limits of what is possible to diminish the size of the lens. Luff calls this the long tail. But, then, he admits that if you had asked the same question 30 years ago, he probably would have says the same thing.
“Changes are incremental now rather than revolutionary,” he says. “A camcorder was a physical impossibility 30 years ago.”
Pharis takes a step even further back looking at the strides the industry has taken.
“You go back to the 1930s and 1940s with this big huge technology, and now you can take hundreds of components and put them in a space the size of your thumb,” Pharis says. “You still need a camera that someone can hold onto and operate stably. It needs to be big enough for stability.”
We tend to think HD is new to our industry. But we've been working on this idea for 30 years. People have been playing around with 3-D for decades. And while the 3-D equipment will be bigger and more complex than what we've become accustomed to, the size will come down, following the same path as HD.
In fact, Luff predicts that we'll have 3-D before 1080p. He says that there's a bigger push for 3-D because it will require consumers to buy new displays.
“New technology introductions, to some degree, are forced on us because manufacturers have to find something else to sell,” Luff says.
The important element in looking toward the future is seeing the past. The first Iconoscope cameras produced unimpressive images, but they inspired people to improve on the technology. Obviously, today we're in the microprocessor age, with surface-mount components and CCD cameras, and of course there's HD, and next is 3-D. Who knows what will happen after that.
Spring Suptic is an associate editor for Broadcast Engineering.
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
