Rank Cintel Flying Spot Scanner CRT

Postwar Television

Rank Cintel Flying Spot Scanner CRT

Early Television

This tube was donated to the museum by Bruce Graham of Santa Clarita, California. Here are his comments about it:

The tube is about two feet long, with a round screen approximately eight inches in diameter. It was responsible for the scanned illumination (flying spot) function. One of the very unique features of this tube is that the faceplate covering the phosphor is almost three inches thick. This design kept any dust that happened to be attracted to the faceplate well out of focus.

The type of machine that used this tube is historically significant. The Cintel Mark III flying spot film scanner debuted in the US in the mid 1970's and quickly became the device preferred by major studios and national networks for film-to-video transfer. It offered a gentle continuous motion film transport, ability to transfer direct from camera negative, high resolution, perfect color registration corner to corner, zero lag, and beautiful colorimetry.

Used for virtually all the biggest movies, television episodes and commercials from the late 1970's until at least the early 2000's, the Cintel Mark III rendered conventional, intermittent movement telecine projectors (such as the RCA TP-66 and FR-35) obsolete.

This worn out (but still under vacuum) tube was given to me by Modern Videofilm, back when I worked there as a telecine engineer in the late 1990's. Modern Videofilm was a very hot independent post production facility in Hollywood in those days, responsible for some of the highest quality transfers of major motion pictures, as well as post production for a whole variety of primetime network TV shows for all the major networks.

The tube was used in "TC-4" at Modern, which as I seem to recall did a lot of work for NBC's "Profiler" primetime crime drama, but it may have occasionally done work for many other shows, as well. Some of the other shows posted at Modern during that period were NBC's "Friends", NBC's "Suddenly Susan", ABC's "Home Improvement" and many more.

Early Television