During the history of television and video production, the look of the studio camera provided prestige to the station or facility. These workhorses were not cheap, but as the industry moved from black and white to color, from tubes to solid-state sensors, from standard to high-definition, technical and creative staffs held side-by-side shootouts with top-of-the-line cameras from the various manufacturers in search of the model that would yield the best pictures, and match up identically one-to-another in color, brightness, contrast and more.

But as the need for video production has spread through government entities, private industry, houses of worship and other venues, a new tier of studio cameras has come on the market. As these lower-cost studio cameras have been developed, one characteristic they all share is the ability to be set up to match each other. Though they may be able to function independently in other applications, in the studio they need to have the ability to be controlled from a base station.

Where studio cameras of yesteryear were all large behemoths, many of the more affordable studio cameras (and the high-end ones, for that matter) are built in the portable configuration, then fitted to a studio adapter which can support a large box-style lens, studio intercom and controls, and a large viewfinder.

Tradeoffs
Manufacturers can’t lower the price without giving up something, and while it’s still possible to buy a sky-is-the-limit, full-featured camera for studio or outdoor broadcast (OB) application, those shopping for a more affordable alternative may well be that what they’re giving up they don’t really need in the first place.

One of the first things camera makers have found they can eliminate to save money is the panoply of resolutions and frame rates. Being able to image in a multitude of formats may be important for a camera on an OB van trying to please domestic and foreign customers on a day-in day-out basis, but most studios have no need for such flexibility.

“If we’re talking about a government application, we can do 1080/60i and 720/60p,” says Alan Keil, vice president and director of engineering for Ikegami. By limiting the company’s HDK-77EC high-definition production camera to those formats, he said the company has saved money in both manufacturing and royalty costs.

Another place camera makers have been able to shave nickels off their lower-cost studio cameras is in signal transmission. High-definition video needs to ride a fiber optic path to go the distances necessary for large sporting events. “But a studio might be less than 100 meters long, so why should you spend ten grand to do fiber when you can do it with triax?” asks Jan Crittenden Livingston, product manager at Panasonic. Fiber transmission options are available for purchase or rent for those applications where long cabling is necessary.

Livingston pointed out that high-definition camera technology that just a few years ago was only available in Panasonic’s top-tier VariCam line is now present in the company’s AG-HPX300 camcorder at a tenth the cost. Later in the year, that P2 camcorder will be fitted with a studio adapter. Building cameras that can do double duty as studio cameras as well as be taken into the field for EFP duty is another way some camera makers have been able to give customers more bang for the buck from their studio cameras.

“If you need to take the cameras out in the field, you can do that,” says Craig Yanagi, JVC national marketing manager for creation products. The company’s GY-HD250U can work with studio box lenses and large viewfinder in the studio, but sports a recording section and can use portable lenses for field work. “The key attribute, though, is that you are able to acquire high quality high definition pictures without the massive expenditures of the past, of systems that typically cost many times more.”

Affordable Advances
Lower-cost studio cameras may not have some of the leading-edge features that their higher priced brethren do, but many of them sport technology that just a few years ago was the latest and greatest. “Our LDK 3000 [Grass Valley’s new entry into the affordable studio camera arena] shares a lot of the characteristics of the LDK 8000 [Grass’ top-of-the-line camera],” says the company’s market development manager, Ken Yas. However, among the departures the 3000 makes from the 8000 is that it utilizes CMOS sensors. They were originally developed for the company’s Infinity camcorder, and are full-sized 2/3-inch.

Ikegami also uses CMOS sensors in its HDK-77EC model. Keil points out that because CMOS sensors pass the image information off the chip in digital form, the need for several processing circuits necessary for a CCD camera (which passes images off the chip in analog form) is eliminated.

Sony repurposed core building blocks, such as its imaging LSI engine and Hyper-HAD FX-based CCD assembly, in creating two new affordable HD cameras: the HXC-100 and HSC-300. “This allows end users to utilize existing infrastructure—RCP panels, master setup and triax cable runs and bulkheads—while minimizing the need to upgrade their facility and thereby creating an even greater cost savings,” says Rob Willox, director of Sony Electronics’ content creation group.

Hitachi Kokusai’s product manager for broadcast and professional products, Emilio Aleman, points to a new sensor technology the company has employed to knock down the costs in its SK-HD5000 production camera. “The optical block has been redesigned, and we’re using 1.1-million-pixel CCDs to generate to generate a high-definition output through the use of horizontal and vertical spatial offset,” he said. “We are generating a full 1920x1080 lines signal from the camera, even though the sensor is a sub-2.2-megapixel CCD. It gives you the performance of [a full 1920x1080 sensor camera] by the time you do your spatial offset and some digital magic in the processing.”