The WV-F15 is a 1990s vintage video camera sold in various different kit forms. There's a basic camera head, that all sorts of different accessories can be attached to (lenses, viewfinders, remote controls, etc.). It's in the industrial/prosumer league, not good enough for broadcast video work, but with some of the features professional users want, and a bit more robust than ordinary domestic gear. It's kind-of reasonable for low budget work, that can't afford better cameras, or schools which might appreciate less controls to play with.
There were two models of F15 cameras, the WV-F15 and WV-F15HS. The HS version being the “high sensitivity” version, but only by about 1 or 2 f stops. They look physically identical, with the same controls and accessories, but have internal differences. The older WV-F10 camera also looks similar, and has similar, but still different, innards, though shares some common accessories.
White balance memory, it doesn't really have one. Sure, it can hold a setting while you put it into stand-by mode, so long as you have an extra battery installed in the camera. But it loses the settings as soon as the camera is switched off. And that's something that's going to happen when filming using batteries. At some stage, you're going to have to change batteries, and then the camera is going to change settings on you.
Two things that have always peeved me about domestic cameras relates to the camera resetting when turned off, ruining the continuity between shots: White balance, and the exposure. Thankfully, at least you can operate the camera with a fully manual mechanical iris. But if you've had to turn the gain up, you've lost that battle, too, as the gain is AGC, not fixed gain.
When providing a CCU for a camera, it should have remote controls of all the electronic user controls on the head, not just some of them. The glaringly obvious omission is a lack of control over the gain. Which, unfortunately, in the design of this camera is no gain, some AGC and more AGC. What's needed is no gain, plus two or more levels of fixed gain. In the control room, you want precise control of the camera to make it do what you want, not to be stuck with bad pictures that you can't control. The other remote control omission is the high speed shutter, you can't turn it on or off, nor change it's speed.
While on the topic of exposure, CCU control of the iris should be an absolute manual control, not playing around with offsets to the auto-iris. I'll be wanting to adjust the iris because the auto-iris got it wrong, don't make me keep on fighting with it. It's also appallingly slow to respond.
It's bad enough fighting with auto-iris and AGC, but to find out that, even when you've disabled them both, there's still something automatically playing with video levels. Try filming someone against a white cyclorama, and the camera will never let the background go to full white, it always drops the video level down. You can only get peak white when only small portion of the picture is white. Having video levels change when objects in the scene move, or the camera pans, tilts, or zooms, is just unacceptable. You can, just about, get away with it when doing a single-camera recording. But try doing a two-camera recording, when you can't get both cameras to expose their shots in the way that you want, and it's really annoying.
As a general design issue, do not make me use thumbwheel controls for things that need regular adjustment (iris, pedestal, white balance), especially on a CCU. Worse still, do not make me use a screwdriver to use a control that commonly needs adjusting (genlock phasing, colour-bar/camera switching, etc). It's far more convenient to have those as normal control knobs that you can grab with your fingertips, with a door over them, to prevent accidentally bumping them. As soon as semi-technical crew have to start playing with screwdrivers, they start breaking controls, particularly plastic ones. Not to mention not having the correct sized screwdriver when you need it.
Still persisting with carbon microphone headphones, from 1950s telephone technology. While simple, they're rather lousy. They crackle badly, the plugs and sockets corrode because DC voltage is being passed through dissimilar metals, they're not loud enough to be heard unless you're filming something very quiet, they're uncomfortable, and they fall off your head when you look around.
Bizarre wobbly bracket arrangement for fitting a large viewfinder to the camera, which doesn't hold the camera firmly in place (the bracket fits to the tripod, and the camera fits to the bracket; likewise, the viewfinder fits to the bracket), and you have the viewfinder wobbling about high above the head, upsetting the balance.
The viewfinder has an annoying tilt mechanism that isn't in the centre of balance, so you always have to lock it into position, very firmly. Quite why so many manufacturers get that wrong, I don't know. As a camera operator, you want a viewfinder that only needs a bit of friction to stay in position, and only needs fingertip pressure to push it into a new position as you're using the camera. You don't want to have to set up the viewfinder between takes, and be stuck unable to see the viewfinder during a tilt, or having to bend down awkwardly so you can still watch it. To do that properly, is quite easy—you put the tilt pivot point in the centre of balance.
The tallies on the viewfinder are bad in two ways, too. The rear tally is tiny, and easily disappears into your blind spot. The front tally has a delayed response—it turns on late, and slowly; likewise for its turn off—making the tally a problem for talent who use the lamps for their cues. It's obviously done to avoid the tally light disrupting the viewfinder, if you take out the delay, the display dims and brightens for a moment due to the loading of the tally lamp changing the supply voltage. Some better solutions would have been to put in less of a delay (we've modified our viewfinders for that), a lower current light bulb, a separately regulated supply for the bulb and viewfinder, or LEDs instead of an incandescent lamp (we'll probably change ours from using a lamp to a LED).