Maverick Tokarev, hard at work in his basement studio, recording a show on his restored 1979 RCA TK-47A. An ex-NBC camera, it served with the network from 1979 to 1996.

The TK-47 was the last studio camera made by RCA before it shut down its camera manufacturing business in 1983. It was also the very last American designed, and American produced camera, before the market was completely taken over by Japanese camera makers (Sony, Ikegami). The TK-47 was among the first generation of computer controlled studio cameras, which allowed "push of a button!" setup and registration. Previous, it took engineers hours to individually "paint up" cameras and align their tubes before a shoot. With a push of a button, multiple cameras could be easily registered and calibrated. It featured much more automation- automatic iris, white balance, black balance, compared to RCA's previous TK-46/45/44A studio cameras, while maintaining use of the big 30mm Plumbicon tubes for the video pickups. The A/B models used a triode-gun Plumbicon, while the EP model used LOC Diode-Gun Plumbicons, for higher resolution and improved comet-tail suppression.

Despite the advances, there were still some faults in the TK-47's design. Poorly placed fans deposited dust over the optical block, resulting in fuzzy pictures and messed up black levels. The computer CCU was iffy, and if it malfunctioned, you did not have a working camera head, and the CTS (Comet-tail-suppression) circuits could be difficult to setup properly.

RCA built the TK-47 from late 1978 to about 1981. It also had a shoulder-mounted TKP-47 "sidekick" camera, which used the same hardware, but with 2/3" Plumbicons. It was intended that the TK-48 would replace the -47's, but after two engineering prototypes, RCA shut down the assembly lines in 1983 and left the camera market completely after GE acquired RCA in 1985. Rigid corporate bureaucracy doomed RCA's camera market after Sony and Ikegami got a foothold in the US market. Unable to adapt to customer needs and meet the performance of Ikegami and Sony, RCA faded into a history, a sad ending to a company that had greatly contributed to American broadcasting.



Drawn by the fantastic  alexbruno