old rca cameras and lenses

[marzsit 0]

i have a pair of old rca auto-iris lenses that were originally used on tube-type rca cctv cameras, the lenses are marked "made in japan" and use video drive with an 8-pin din connector for the camera. i want to change connectors so that they can be used with modern sony and panasonic ccd cameras (the intended cameras have dc or video drive capability), i have the new 4-pin connectors but i cannot find the pinout or color code for the lens cord connections... there are 3 wires, red black and yellow. can i assume that black is common ground, red is power and yellow is video signal without burning anything up?? unfortunately, i don't have a working rca tube camera... if i did, i'd probe it to find the voltages. has anyone run into this problem before, or does anyone have an old rca camera with an 8-pin din iris connector that they could check for me?

[marzsit 0]

so, are there no techies here, or only plug-and-play experts?

[rory 0]

No, most of us techs just buy a new lens .. they are cheap now and much better .. maybe cooperman or ken can add some input .. they like to play with old cameras ..

[marzsit 0]

i did find out that the rca lenses were made by asahi optical (pentax) also sold under the cosmicar name. actually much higher quality than a common cctv lens available today because in order to get a good image with a grainy monochrome vidicon tube, the lenses had to be very, very good (much like the zeiss jena lenses the dslr guys are fighting over one ebay these days..)

 

i took an educated guess and soldered the yellow to the video drive, red to power and black to ground. works like a champ with a sony ssc-c104 and a panasonic wv-cp234, much better than the cheap plastic computar lenses they both used to have.. hopefully they won't draw too much current from the camera's power supply.