![[picture of camera]](./images/national-wv-85ea.jpeg)
I think this was the first video camera that I bought (in the 1980s). I got it as something to fiddle with while I was studying electronics (which included television and video). It's not a particularly brilliant camera from the 1970s, although it was surprisingly sensitive for filming in low light, for its age. Its scan linearity is poor, the scanning circuitry screams extremely loudly at 15 kHz (I've compared it with another one of the same model, and it did exactly the same thing, though a very similar model did not). It's quite heavy, for such a small camera, and happens to be quite dirty (it's ex-school equipment) which no amount of scrubbing ever made it look clean.
It runs from 12 volts DC, at around 1 amp, and requires an external sync generator that's generally provided from a half-inch, open reel, portable video recorder (which I don't have). Though I do have other equipment that will produce compatible separate 4 volt peak-to-peak horizontal and vertical sync signals for it.
This one's been slightly modified so the cable comes out the back, rather than the bottom, so I could get it to sit on the tripod that I used to use with it. There's a pistol-grip that screws into the bottom of the camera, with a mechanically linked record-trigger, and a tripod thread under the handle. It makes it rather unwieldy on top of a tripod, seriously strains the pan/tilt-head tilt-locks, and a very heavy thing to hold up in front of your face for hand-held filming.
10-pin CCJ connector pin-outs
- Video out signal
- Video out ground
- Vertical sync in (50 Hz, 4 volts p-p)
- Vertical & horizontal sync ground
- Horizontal sync in (15,625 Hz, 4 volts p-p)
- Record trigger signal (I seem to recall around zero volts for paused, above six volts to record)
- Microphone audio signal (buffered, but I seem to recall it's still at microphone signal levels)
- Microphone audio ground
- 12 DC volt supply ground
- +12 volt DC supply