Baird Television Limited

[ppppenguin]

Near enough perfect geometry too, limited only by the lenses.

Intermediate film may seem like a totally daft technology but it lived on for decades in specialist applications. Though not in real time. It was a substitute for video recording in situations where that wasn't feasible. Notably on space missions where pictures would be shot on film, processed (wet chemistry in space!) and then scanned slowly to send back to earth.

It's astonishing that it was more practical to send a photo lab into space than develop a space-worthy video recorder. But that's how it was done. It's easy to forget how hard video recording was. Also how limited and heavy video cameras were if you wanted high quality imaging. To add to the problems you didn't have the wideband links to earth to send images in real time and sometimes you didn't have line of sight anyway.

I think mechanical scanning is still used for specialist cameras (infra red?) .

Of course there's till a body of enthusiasts such as our own Steve Ostler (Panrock) who do interesting experiments with mechanical scanning.
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