This is possibly one of the least interesting topics I have ever become obsessed with. And yet, here we are.
In the late 1980's at Mitsubishi, an unclear number of engineers were tackling a problem. And their solution was novel, pulled from the past, and the most widespread example of a fascinating technology that was almost adopted across the USA.
Okay, first I should probably explain the image and two gifs up there first.
The first image is a dissected Mitsubishi MV-S55 S-VHS-C camcorder from Japan. It is non-functional, and in spite of owning the service manual for it, the chances that it becomes functional are very very minimal. But why did I buy a camcorder from Japan?
The viewfinder. It's all in the viewfinder.
The second image is what the viewfinder for that camcorder looks like, a single rainbow bar, I am assuming the horizontal deflection coil of the tiny CRT is bad. In theory I can fix that, or at least prod at it some.
The third image? Well that is the viewfinder from the Mitsubishi HS-CX6, the exact same camcorder made for the PAL market, I imported this one from the UK and when it arrived it looked like it spent the better part of a year half underwater. And the viewfinder was one of the few things not gunked up. This is great! In this gif you can see how the viewfinder works.. but maybe I should explain it.
These viewfinders are incredibly special, and work like nearly no other CRT made since the 1950s. And I am ignoring single-chip DLP projection for right now. The theory of operation is pretty simple to explain too!
The CRT is monochrome, because of that you can get a much higher resolution than if you attempted to have a half inch color CRT, just have to have a coating of phosphor and let the electron beam do it's thing. But how do we get this to be color? A wheel! Or.. in this case a cone, because a cone at an obtuse angle is more compact than a wheel. Regardless, you just need to me fast about things. You divide your wheel into slices of color, 6 panels, R G B R G B, and rotate it in front of the screen. When the Red panel is coming down to encompass the screen, feed it just the Red portion of your frame. Then repeat for Green and finally Blue. By the time that finishes, you have refreshed the Red signal in your buffer, and have another go-around.
In the 1950s this was achieved with a complex and entirely incompatible system of broadcast proposed by CBS, that actually did get airtime in test markets! It was actually officially adopted by the FCC at one point too. But smarter heads prevailed, and realized how insane of a system this would be. Given RCA yet another chance to get NTSC color right.
The viewfinder receives the signal from the camcorder, and deciphers the luma and chrominance signals into 3 color channels. Then stores them into extremely fast frame buffers, and dumps them one after another, repeating ad nauseam as long as a clean composite signal comes into the viewfinder.
This is actually a really neat feature of camcorder viewfinders going all the way back nearly to the first ones on separate camera/recorder systems. Because the camera needs to feed the recorder something, it was just as easy to make the camera output composite video, which the recorder can just deposit onto the recording media, and you can siphon off to feed a miniaturized television set perched so the operator can see. As time progressed everything got smaller, but they theory stayed the same.
But back to our third gif up there, you can see the monochrome CRT, and then as the view pans to put the color cone between the camera and screen, color becomes a reality. This has advantages of keeping the high resolution offered by monochrome viewfinders of the era, and offering the view of color. However there is a bit I am glossing over here.
This camcorder came out in late 1992, early 1993. Depending on market, and sources I check. By that point even mid-grade palmable camcorders were gaining color LCD viewfinders, and not just the big ones that the Sharp ViewCam had, but ones that were direct replacements for their CRT counterparts.
Mitsubishi advertised this camcorder as having a much more improved display in comparison, but.. the truth is at this scale it is not incredibly noticeable. Sure comparable LCD viewfinders are a bit grainer, and they can be a bit darker. But when you are dealing with a screen that is half an inch across the gains of having a complex mechanical system that needs syncing are very minimal.
And that is where the fascination I have with this camcorder viewfinder comes from. In the mid 1950s everyone who understood the blossoming color television market knew that mechanical color was not the way forward. Surely this must have been a pet project of a few engineers at Mitsubishi that was let come to market? It's only seen on two products that I can tell. I can find no evidence of it ever making it to the United States, in spite of it being patented here. And the rest of the camcorder? It's barely even mid-tier for 1993, it honestly feels way too cheap, and is lacking a lot of features that were setting the competition apart.
It has a specialized AV cable, but only feeds out not in. It does S-VHS-C, but the plastic it is made of feels creaky as all hell. I just feel like Mitsubishi banked on this tiny feature, what they would dub the "Colour Truefinder" in PAL regions, as being their big break in the camcorder market... and it just wasn't. That being said it is still incredibly fascinating. It's just a shame that the NTSC one I have is toast, and the PAL one has since started going back in weird ways since that third gif was made, I suspect it might just be that these were made cheap and 30 years ago.
Anyway, thanks for reading, if you have made it this far. I originally wanted to make a whole ass youtube video about this camcorder. But when I got it in my hands this morning, and found out it was nonfunctional. I spent the whole day sad about it.
