arg. I got a video camera at the electronics fair, and I'm gonna need to pay more than the camera costs to get the fucking manual.

that should be illegal

I got it working. Screw the service manual!
This is a JVC GX-J700U color video camera, from approximately 1984.
It's got "excellent picture quality", 360 lines resolution!
It's got genlock, color bars, and built in character generator.
(It's also got a mic and viewfinder, but I pulled them off for this picture)
I don't know why it's outputting B&W. this is supposedly a color camera.
@foone Just to get in the right general ballpark - pop the video out up on a scope, set the trigger to TV line if available, or otherwise just set the trigger to normal mode, falling edge, adjust the level until it's below 0v and mess with it till it stabilizes. Do you have a burst at the beginning of each line?
(See my highly useful pinned... shitpost.)

@foone ya know what, this thing has officially surprised me

EIAJ connector on a camera that also provides genlock input and BNCs? That's a first to me - I mean, it kinda makes sense, EIAJ just has composite out as does the camera itself, but I was half expecting it to have something a little fancier. I guess JVC probably also sold at least semi-pro-quality (what format?) messenger bag VTRs with the EIAJ connection to match this.

Also I'm a little sad I didn't get to say hi there :D

@foone I tried throwing a few internet searches into the void for a picture of the shading controls on this thing to see if there's an externally accessible or labeled switch for making it spit out b/w only for level setup and came back only with an old magazine and fell down a rabbit hole

I dunno why I didn't expect to ever see a big magazine ad for the Tektronix TM500 series test equipment but here we are: https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1983-01/page/n29/mode/2up

(I have very mixed feelings about this TM500 stuff...)

Radio Electronics (January 1983) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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