https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube
"Image Orthicon Camera Tubes": http://www.r-type.org/articles/art-141.htm
"The 5655 three inch Image Orthicon television pick-up tube is an example of top quality television camera electronics from the late 1940s. These tubes were found in professional studio cameras in the 1950s and they replaced the Iconoscope tube cameras.": http://www.r-type.org/exhib/aaj0100.htm
They have a beautiful "blooming" effect when you overdrive them:
"Target overdrive visual effects from Concord NEI-17 vidicon camera: This some cool target overdrive effects made from my late 60s Concord NEI-17 B&W vidicon tube TV camera. I had the camera pointed to some items in the kitchen and to my computer and I adjust the external target control knob on the back of my camera up and down to which when the target level is adjusted high you get a bloom/glow effect and when adjusted to extreme excess the picture is solarized, very neat simple way to make instant cool effects! :D": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRQmAHpTnEQ
I wonder if anyone has written a shader that is a physical simulation of a vidicon tube, that can reproduce these effects. Here's an article by somebody who set out to mimic the effect, but I don't think he did a full physical simulation, he just tried to approxomate the effect:
http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=35148
Here's the resulting video he made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq7y4gsW3Yc
The Donnie and Marie show's Disco Finale has some awesome vidicon tube blooming effects with all the disco balls and sequins under spotlights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-99Ux4_vnU
Portishead's "All Mine" video shows a somewhat subtler and beautiful vidicon tube effect, along with some simple video feedback:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsPTbRGu9Yk
The chaos researcher James Crutchfield did his PhD thesis at Santa Cruz about the space time dynamics video feedback, using an analog video processing computer. His video explains the theory and mathematics behind effective video feedback, which inspires me:
Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. Citation: J. P. Crutchfield, "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback". Physica 10D (1984) 229-245.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE
Here's a paper he wrote that describes the effects in that video:
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984....
"Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA."
"Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposes two models for video feedback dynamics based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments."
Some interesting excerpts:
"In the beginning, I argued that a video feedback system is a space-time simulator. But a simulator of what exactly? This section attempts to answer this question as concretely as possible at this time. A very useful tool in this is the mathematical theory of dynamical systems. It provides a consistent language for describing complex temporal behavior. Video feedback dynamics, though, is interesting not only for the time-dependent behavior but also for its complex spatial patterns. In the following section I will come back to the question of whether current dynamical systems theory is adequate for the rich spatio-temporal behavior found in video feedback. This section introduces the qualitative language of dynamical systems [5], and then develops a set of discrete-time models for video feedback based on the physics of video systems. At the section's end I propose a continuum model akin to the reaction-diffusion equations used to model chemical dynamics and biological morphogenesis."
He also talks about "dislocations", which is similar to the effect of the error diffusion dithering that I love:
"A good example of quasi-attractors is the class of images displaying dislocations. This terminology is borrowed from fluid dynamics, where dislocations refer to the broken structure of convective rolls in an otherwise simple array. Dislocations are regions of broken symmetry where the flow field has a singularity. The formation of this singularity typically requires a small, but significant, energy expenditure*. In video feedback, dislocations appear as inter-digitated light and dark stripes. The overall pattern can be composed of regular parallel arrays of alternating light and dark stripes with no dislocations, and convoluted, maze-like regions where stripes break up into shorter segments with many dislocations. The boundaries between segment ends form the dislocations. They can move regularly or wander erratically. Dislocations form in pairs when a stripe breaks in two. They also annihilate by coalescing two stripes. Dislocations make for very complex, detailed patterns whose temporal evolution is difficult to describe in terms of dynamical systems because of their irregular creation and annihilation. Nonetheless, when perturbed very similar images reappear. A quasi-attractor would be associated with global features, such as the relative areas of regular stripe arrays and dislocation regions, the time-averaged number of dislocations, or the pattern's gross symmetry."