VX2000 Cine-Gamma
 

I asked a person who then asked a sony engineer the following question...

Is there a way to hack a VX2000 to give it a "film-like" linear gamma curve. This is the response I got, through a forwarded email...

"The cine look you are attempting to achieve is done by shutting off the gamma correction and applying linear gain to the preamp section of the camera. Lifting the trace from the processor supplying gamma correction data to the preamps should do what you are asking."

I have not been able to get any further info from him. Any engineers out there wish to comment on this any further? Maybe this should be posted under a different section. Let me know.

I'm shocked he'd even go that far as to tell you something like that...

But from that response...I wonder if he is implying that the gamma correction takes place in an independent component...if that is the case all you'd need to do would be place a jumper around it I think (or several jumpers as the case would probably be). Then you'd have to figure out how to impliment that linear gain...which I assume would just be an op amp circuit of some type. I don't know...sounds like something that require a bit of risky experimentation.

I'm guessing wildly here, but part of that description sounds more like an internal adjustment using an oscilloscope than a physical hack.

The choices offered by cine-gamma capable cams may well be switchable presets of adjustments which can be made but only internally with the VX2000. Maybe the physical hack would be to add several copies of the particular circuit, each adjusted to a different gamma preference and make them switchable. I hope somebody from the BBC reads this and arrives at a solution.