A Look Back at (My) 524 Months with Broadcast Cameras

Thank you to Film-TV Video for the original article - you can view it here

It was early 1983. I had just turned 21 when I joined Hitachi Denshi's European headquarters as a service engineer for professional studio equipment. That marked the beginning of a long and rewarding career working with broadcast cameras - and with the many technical challenges, innovations, and changes that came with them.

At the end of August 2026, after 43 years and 8 months, I will be saying goodbye to my professional life and entering my (un)retirement.

I would like to take this opportunity to look back and share some of the highlights of those past decades, seen entirely from my own personal perspective.

The Early YearsWhen I started in 1983, virtually all professional studio cameras still used image pickup tubes. Plumbicon tubes, developed by Philips, were predominantly used. Philips was later honored with an Emmy Award for this development. At Hitachi, among others, the Saticon tube was used, an image pickup tube developed jointly with NHK.

These tube-based cameras required a relatively long warm-up period before they could operate with reasonable stability. At the same time, both the tubes and the camera electronics were subject to continuous drift. Maintaining consistently good picture quality therefore required regular checks and recalibration while the cameras were in operation.

The alignment of these cameras had to be carried out very carefully and according to a strictly prescribed procedure. If an adjustment was skipped or performed in the wrong order, it was often impossible to make up for it later without consequences. Servicing and aligning these cameras was therefore a demanding task that required not only solid technical knowledge, but above all experience and a very meticulous approach.

As a service engineer, I found these cameras to be a major challenge. At the same time, I was fortunate to have an outstanding specialist in television studio cameras by my side in the person of my then supervisor, Mitsuru Endo, from whom I was able to learn a great deal.

Another important opportunity to truly understand the technology and gain practical experience came from the acceptance tests that were still common at the time, carried out together with customers, as well as the technical specification tests at the IRT in Munich.

There, I had the opportunity to spend several days at a time, together with some of the best-known camera technology specialists of that era, measuring cameras in minute detail, discussing the results, and, where necessary, verifying improvements to the settings.

During those early years, I learned many of the fundamentals that have enabled me to assess a camera's picture quality to this day, and to better understand the impact of faults or limitations on the resulting image.

Looking back today, those first years were undoubtedly one of the most technically demanding, but also one of the most educational, periods of my professional life. The cameras were complex and sensitive, and they demanded far more from a service engineer than technical knowledge alone. They required experience, patience, and an exceptionally meticulous approach.

The Beginning of the CCD EraAround 1987/1988, the time had come: the first commercially available studio cameras with solid-state image sensors entered the market. Initially, these new sensors were predominantly CCDs (Charge-Coupled Devices), although the various manufacturers used quite different CCD technologies.

The Japanese manufacturers primarily used FIT-CCDs (Frame Interline Transfer), while Philips BTS opted for the FT (Frame Transfer) principle. At a later stage, the Japanese manufacturers replaced their FIT sensors with more advanced IT-CCDs (Interline Transfer). Philips BTS, on the other hand, continued to use the FT principle until CCD technology was eventually replaced by CMOS sensors.

For me personally, this technological shift opened up an entirely new opportunity. In September 1989, I was able to spend several weeks in Japan, where I learned directly from the developers at Hitachi's camera factory in Tokyo all about the new CCD technology and the specific signal-processing techniques associated with it.

I subsequently passed this knowledge on to the RAI in Italy through several training sessions for their technical camera specialists. In this way, my role gradually evolved from that of a traditional service engineer into that of a trainer and technical advisor for the new camera technology.

In the summer of 1990, the FIFA World Cup was held in Italy. It was one of the first major international events to be produced entirely with CCD cameras. Half of the cameras used by RAI came from Hitachi Denshi, while the other half came from Philips BTS - the company that, just a few years later, would become my new professional home.

For the World Cup, I spent several weeks near Milan as a backup service engineer. In addition to providing technical support, this gave me a very special opportunity: I was able to watch several matches involving the German national team directly in the stadium. The German team would go on to win the tournament and become world champions - an experience that, for this personal reason as well, remains particularly memorable to me to this day.

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