A prototype of a color TV camera

The experiments with color TV have started as soon as the black-and-white TV was invented. The first color TV transmission was presented in 1928, but it took many more years to develop a fully operational commercial color TV system. The first public color transmission started in the United States in 1953. In Czechoslovakia, the first experiments have begun at the end of the 1950s. Regular color broadcast started in 1973.

This camera was made in the second half of the 1960s. This is the very first Czechoslovak color camera. In a color camera, the image has to be optically divided into three parts - a red, green and blue component - and each component has to be scanned individually. The professional black-and-white cameras of the era used Image Orthicon tubes, which provided a perfect black-and-white picture, but were too large to be used in a color camera, as three of them had to be contained in the camera. That's why this camera uses Vidicon tubes, which are much smaller and cheaper, but they produce lower quality image that would be not suitable for regular TV broadcast, so this camera was used only for testing purposes. For the start of regular color broadcast in the 1970s, more modern cameras with new Plumbicon tubes were used. All the cameras of the era required a separate "camera unit", a large cabinet full of electronics, which was connected to the camera by a thick cable. Sadly, the camera unit for this camera was not preserved.