1939 off TV film recording of "The Streets Of New York"
 

G'day all.

I've been skimming through the surviving kinescope television recordings article http://www.earlytelevision.org/image...rigins.pdf.pdf and have came across an article of real interest which is the televised play "The Streets Of New York" which aired 31st August 1939. Someone had pointed their 16mm home movie film camera to the screen of the TV set during the broadcast and recorded parts of the show onto film. There's about 11 minutes of footage and it has been preserved and 1 minute of it has been made available on the net and can be seen here http://www.paleycenter.org/simon-the...of-tv-history/ . This is amazing footage, the pictures are nice and clear unlike other surviving amateur TV film recordings of the time and apart from the camera wobble this recording is so well done that it compares to kinescopes made in the 50s! It's so amazing to get a better idea of how iconoscope pictures looked back in the 30s!!! :D

Thats impressively good quality all things concidered.

It's too bad its been through so many transfer stages. For example, it's hard to guess if the highlight clipping and blooming is from the original or a later degradation. And there is a lot of lag that could be from transfer of the film on a vidicon telecine.