March 6, 2015, 8:41 pm

While digging through the junk bins of Akihabara today I picked up what I thought was a CCD security camera. I interested in pulling out the CCD and sticking it under a SEM I’m going to be looking at tomorrow.

However it turned out to be something quite different! Before CCDs and CMOS sensors, when you wanted to electrically capture images you used vacuum tubes!

Here’s the tube after pulling everything apart (teardown photos below):



The following diagram shows how the tube works, but check out the wikipedia page for more information.

Not exactly what I was looking for but an interesting find and the C-mount optics will be useful for another project.