ABSTRACT
Thomson has taken a very different approach to other 2/3-inch three-chip camera manufacturers: its primary design parameter was that there should not be any data compression within the camera. Technically this would be described as a 4.4.4 signal. This means that the data stream coming out of the back of the camera is so large that it takes two Bayonet N Connector (BNC) cables to transfer it to some form of recording format. Thomson has named the form in which the data leaves the camera FilmStream. With the current state of data recording technology there is no tape format that can cope with this much information and, if no compression is to be used, it must be fed to a server or some form of hard disk recording format. At its introduction the camera could not be used as a camcorder so the purity of the data coming from it was both its main advantage and its greatest drawback as recordings could only be made on rather unwieldy equipment.
