RCA TK-41
A broadcast color camera that turns up in the classifieds more often than it turns up in working order — and the ads tell you almost everything that's actually known.
Overview
Here's the honest situation with the RCA TK-41: the paper trail is thin, and almost all of it is classified advertising. The camera appears repeatedly in the back pages of Broadcasting magazine around 1969, usually as part of a station's equipment clear-out, and those listings are the closest thing to documentation most collectors will ever see. One advertisement offers "2 RCA color camera chains, TK-40A modified by RCA to approximate TK-41," with roughly 5000 hours on them, at $13,000 each. That single line is worth more than a spec sheet: it confirms the TK-41 existed as a distinct model that a TK-40A could be upgraded toward, and it puts a real secondhand price on a camera chain in the late 1960s.
Other listings are equally matter-of-fact. A seller in Milwaukee offered "Two RCA TK-41, two TK-42 cameras. Fully updated, presently in service, available soon" through WTMJ, and period coverage in Studio-Sound (February 1965, p.6) noted recorder jams when equipment was placed in a street-facing window display. Another ad listed "4 RCA TK 41-C late model color camera chains," each fitted with no-burn EEV orthicons and a Varitol 10:1 zoom lens, offered individually or as a package with financing terms available. The "TK 41-C" designation in that listing is the only variant name that surfaces anywhere in the available material, and it's worth noting for anyone trying to date or identify a specific chassis.
What these ads collectively establish is a camera that lived in working broadcast facilities and was sold on as stations retooled. The phrase "fully updated" and "late model" recurs because that's how this gear changed hands — as functional chains, not shelf queens. Buyers were expected to care about orthicon tube condition (hence the "no-burn" callout, a real selling point on a used image tube) and about whether the zoom lens came with it. Nobody in these listings is talking about cosmetics.
The TK-41's relationship to the TK-40A is the one piece of lineage the sources actually support: RCA itself modified TK-40A cameras "to approximate TK-41" specification, according to that Indiana seller's listing. Beyond that, the available documentation doesn't give production years, original list price, tube complement, or resolution figures. Anyone claiming otherwise is working from memory, not from paper — and this archive won't do that.
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