1974 Akai VC-150 two-tube portable color camera

This is a very early handheld color camera, and one of Akai's first. Like most early color cameras, it requires a separate CCU. But, when used portably with the Akai VT-150 color VTR, no CCU is required, because the pre-video from the camera is what gets recorded onto the tape anyway. The camera features a 1.5 inch electronic viewfinder, 6X zoom lens, auto iris, auto white balance, and a built-in microphone.

This camera uses the two-tube design, one tube is mounted horizontally, and the other tube is mounted vertically in the hand grip. The tube in the normal horizontal position is the red/blue, or chrominance tube. The tube in the hand grip is the luminance/green tube. The tubes are 2/3 inch vidicons. The camera contains the deflection boards, and the color matrixing circuitry and sync encoder is in the CCU.

On the side of the camera, there is an auto white balance button, an auto/manual iris switch, and a three position switch which adjusts how much the auto iris compensates. Just below the viewfinder are two trim pots for tube registration. The CCU has the camera connector, power switch, video and audio outputs. On one side of the CCU there are 3 BNC input jacks which are not original, and were an optional modification for the CCU. The jacks are for V sync, H sync, and subcarrier. There are no manual color controls accessible to the user. A few different versions of this camera were made, for industrial use, broadcast, etc. I have three of these cameras, two VC-150s and one CVC-150. the only difference is the CVC-150 doesn't have a record light in the viewfinder. Big thanks to Richard Diehl for sending me these cameras and CCU. The camera seen here, I have restored, and is fully operational. These cameras perform amazingly in good lighting, but they need a huge amount of light!!