WV-V3 first light!

Here it is folks! the first light of the Panasonic WV-V3 3-tube Newvicon camera! I've waited about two months to see if this camera works and to see the viewfinder light up was quite a relief. I bought this camera knowing that it was not in tip-top shape. I bought it knowing that the viewfinder shroud was missing, as was the knob for the auto-iris. But these seemed easy enough to fix. I also especially love that it's RED! Now, although black and white is fine and dandy, I did want to see what this looked like on a larger, color monitor. But all I got was this:

It was obviously a problem with the video signal itself, not the tubes, because bars even looked absolutely sickly:

Let's see what the scope says:

....and this is why I need a new scope. I can't see anything in that. Either way, I bumped it about and finally got a stable signal. turns out the cable I was using (bare wire shoved into the BNC jack) aggravated the video signal. One quick trip to radioshack and I had a BNC to RCA adaptor and got this:

However, the tubes are a bit misaligned. In this photo you can see the red and blue channels are quite off:

however, an alignment card was quickly put in front of the camera and the "auto cent" switch pressed. It did little to properly align the tubes, so in true tinkering fashion I pulled it open!

Quite honestly, I was quite baffled by the many trim pots and abbreviated descriptions for each one on the inside of the camera. However, I did get it fairly close, but realizing that I can't do this every time I setup the camera, I went for the "auto cent" switch. That just made things worse! It undid a lot of the progress I had made. Currently I am blaming the tripod which is far too unstable for a camera of this size and can't keep the camera still enough to do an alignment. Also, since the iris control has been damaged and yet to be repaired, I cannot get the camera to full white on the test card, which may affect the performance of the auto centering function. At the end of the day I was able to get it to look like this:


The tubes are still out of alignment. You can see this especially above the closet in the second picture. There is a bit of red bleeding out the top. Since I've taken these shots I have set the system up a bit more permanently. I have secured the power supply connector better (I now use the pins pulled out of the auxiliary 12v cable from the power supply plugged into the XLR 12v jack) and have secured the power supply to the back of the camera using bits of string and sticky-tape. This is hopefully not a permanent situation. I'll upload more pics of the new setup soon. My next project with this will be fixing the iris control.