Museum of the Broadcast Television Camera

E-mail Received,

Dale 520 Camera

Dale Lamm writes in his email;

Those are Dage 520's. They were mono Vidicon cameras. This is confirmed by 7735 tube type numbers in one of your pix. My understanding is that Dage equipment was popular with educational institutions. The company I once worked for (both a UHF broadcaster and an equipment dealer) sold Dage and other brands to colleges. We even used a pair of them on our B & W remote unit, along with a Dynair switcher, Riker sync gen and RCA TR-5 quad. Back in 1970, this wasn't too bad a setup for a small town station. The color truck had PC-70's.

That big connector has been around at least since the days of a TK-11 camera. Nearly every domestic camera maker with split camera-CCU used it. In the color realm, it was TV-81 and TV-85 nomenclature, IIRC. The CCU's you seek are just 2RU tall. Dage could take a zoom lens, as your pix show. We only had one of those, the second 520 used C-mount fixed lenses.

520's weren't too heavy. One person could place them on a Hercules tripod easily. Being Vidicon, they were almost unusable doing night high-school football games at your typical 1970's era stadium. Pretty much a daytime camera. I am still amazed that our sales department could line up any sponsors for some of the horrible quality tape we dragged back to the studio after shooting a Friday night football game. Towards the end of their life at our station, the best 520 got to be the scoreboard camera in the color truck. Hardly a glorious end to one's career.

To a kid of 17 working his first job in broadcasting, a 520 was a magnificent triumph of engineering, exceeded only by a quad tape machine.

Dale