Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I've read that the original videos were actually very high quality, but they
> didn't get any sort of converter between NASA's systems and regular TV sets,
> so someone just pointed a TV camera at the monitor in NASA and that's what
> was broadcast.  Then, nobody bothered to convert the video afterwards, until
> all the machines that could read the tapes had been scrapped.

Sounds like a legend to me.

IIRC the reason why the best recordings are spread so far around the world was
that the video broadcasts were converted at each receiving station, and they
would broadcast the TV signal from whichever station currently was in the best
position to receive a good feed from Apollo.

Though it sounds plausible that the converters may actually have been built
according to this principle, using a display vacuum tube and a camera vacuum
tube in an enclosed chamber. But they were certainly more sophisticated than
just someone casually pointing a camera at a monitor that happened to stand
around in a corner.

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