These were the second set of colour cameras that I bought, again a pair of second hand units. They're also showing their age, though they were never as good as the old Philips studio cameras. These, and the Philips cameras, were both previously owned by a church, and used for live community television broadcasting by Life TV in 1988. These cameras were also used in another community television test broadcast, by SCAT TV in 1993. Their last production work was in the mid-1990s (at one of the Adelaide Fringe Festivals, and they were still producing very nice pictures).
![[picture of camera]](./images/jvc-ky-2000b.jpeg)
Some of their features
-
A viewfinder that could be manipulated into a wide variety of positions, and didn't require you to have your eye glued to it to be able to see the image; you could stand well back and see it fine.
-
An interesting exposure meter in the viewfinder that worked like a horizontal video waveform indicator. You could not only see the signal level across the different portions of the picture, you could easily see it flatten out at white clip. This technique was much more useful than the zebra patterning that's commonly in use, today, in most professional cameras. Zebra patterning can make it nearly impossible to see what you're filming, and focus on it.
-
Uses dichroic mirrors to separate the colours for each pickup tube. Supposedly, you lose less light through them than using the prism technique (as my Philips studio and Panasonic F250 cameras use).
-
Pedestal and black balance maintained automatically after engineering setup (they had no user black balance controls) by scanning beyond the exposed area of the pickup tubes, providing a reference black level in step with any tube performance changes (e.g. as caused by temperature drift).
-
After a few minutes warm-up, the camera seems very good at maintaining your white balance settings, even if turned off (it has a battery backed-up memory). Unlike some other cameras that I could mention. JVC seemed to have designed this camera quite well.
-
Could be used as a stand-alone, or remote controlled camera (electronic signal controls only), by changing a switch on the main board.