Trinicon

Trinicon is a registered trademark of Sony. It uses a vertically striped RGB color filter over the faceplate of an otherwise standard vidicon imaging tube to segment the scan into corresponding red, green and blue segments. Only one tube was used in the camera, instead of a tube for each color, as was standard for color cameras used in television broadcasting. It is used mostly in low-end consumer cameras and camcorders, though Sony also used it in some moderate cost professional cameras in the 1980s, such as the DXC-1800 and BVP-1 models.

                           Although the idea of using color stripe filters over the target was not new, the Trinicon was the only tube to use the primary RGB colors. This necessitated an additional electrode buried in the target to detect where the scanning electron beam was relative to the stripe filter. Previous color stripe systems had used colors where the color circuitry was able to separate the colors purely from the relative amplitudes of the signals. As a result the Trinicon featured a larger dynamic range of operation.