iconoscope

Zworklin's iconoscope accumulated the image over an entire frame time, but photon to electron conversion was very inefficient.

The iconoscope integrates light over a full frame time, but lacks a photomultiplier stage to amplify the emitted electrons.

Sure, Zworykin played an early role but likely not all of his ideas about the iconoscope were original but likely those of Rosing, his teacher.

He invented the first electronic TV camera - the iconoscope - and fought with Sarnoff at RCA for years over the patent rights for electronic TV.

Both iconoscope tubes and direct-view storage tubes differ from simple CRTs by having inside an insulating or semiconducting surface on which a distribution of electric charge can be stored.

He discussed a lot the possibility of using the already existing iconoscope tubes (used in video cameras) and he concluded that some improvements are needed in order to use CRT's as memories.

In iconoscope tubes, illumination caused by an external image projected on the tube face created an electric charge distribution inside the tube, which was read electronically, generating thus a video signal, so it was the inverse of a direct-view tube, where an electric charge distribution is written inside the tube, where it controls the fluorescence of the screen, creating an image that can be viewed outside.

Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".