In the day that was made there wasn't much in the way of video compression. There was a wavelet IC if I recall.
First there are 3 CCDs, where pretty much all of the light is captured and used. Modern CMOS chips with a Bayer filter immediately by design at are best 50% efficient. CMOS image sensors have smaller pixels with less active area that is photo sensitive.
Low pixel count (SD) CCD technology is lower noise than CMOS:
formatting link
CCD noise is SQRT(number of electrons in a bucket) vs CMOS KTC (popcorn or 1/f) noise.
Is 3 CCD (or 3 CMOS) less common nowadays that it used to be on broadcast and professional cameras? You have the problem of maintaining registration between the sensors, but as you say, the resolution and sensitivity/noise will be better because the pixels can be larger for the same pixel spacing because the pixels are co-located although on different sensors rather that being side by side with a Bayer filter. Presumably registration corrections can be made digitally without needing to physically move one sensor relative to the others, as was necessary with tube cameras :-(
I've been very impressed with the low noise on my Nikon D90 digital *still* camera. I can see very little difference between pictures taken at 200 ASA and those taken at 3200 ASA - except on areas of uniform colour. And that's with a single CMOS sensor with Bayer filter. However it's not so good for shooting movie clips because a) it's 24 rather than 25 fps, and b) the rows are read out sequentially, giving rise to the notorious "rolling shutter" effect which causes vertical edges of fast moving objects to appear to slope as the object has moved between the top row and bottom rows of pixels being read. I think also the sensor uses a fairly low resolution which is upscaled to the 1280x720 of the recorded files, instead of using the full resolution of (part of) the sensor, so one pixel on the sensor matches one pixel in the video file.
Do CCDs have better or worse exposure latitude that CMOS? I've noticed a lot of cheaper cameras used for filming fly-on-the-wall documentaries have really obnoxious crushing of highlights - shiny spots on people's faces or bright skies - which is much less noticeable with broadcast standard cameras. And often it's only one or two of the three colours which max out, so the bleached parts are cyan, yellow or magenta rather than pure white which is more tolerable.
What technology do broadcast cameras generally use nowadays - CCD or CMOS?
That was my initial belief, but couldn't find any reference to a camera, typically used in movies with a higher frame rate.
They certainly exist for specialised slowmo sequences, but don't seem to be used mainstream. If you know differently I will happily bow to your greater knowledge.
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