This first two missions (11 and 12) used black and white video cameras. The one used for 12 was burned out after a few minutes when one of the astronauts (Conrad or Bean, don't remember which) accidentally pointed it at the sun. The one on 13 was never used because that one never landed. Starting with Apollo 14 (Alan Shepard's mission) the cameras were color. By the time we got to the last mission, Apollo 17, the cameras were dramatically improved, providing quality nearly as good as the images you saw on the evening news every night.
You're right. I remember that now. But I thought it was the Hasselblad still camera that burned out that automatic apperture.
I was thinking a video RECORDING camera, which I don't think it was. Guess I'm getting rummy. Of course they had a video camera. They left it there to transmit video of them lifting off.
It was Bean - the rookie on the flight. That was the same flight where ground personnel snuck photos from Playboy magazine into Conrad's and Bean's checklists on the lunar surface.
One of the episodes of HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon" documents this mission pretty thoroughly (and entertainingly).
The engineers realized this problem after the first mission and changed to the then-new version of the vidicon with a silicon diode target, which was essentially immune to the burnout effect.
Then, they went color, with a system that used a single camera and tube, but with a synchronized filter wheel with red, green, and blue segments. The sequential color frames were then converted into standard color TV back at Mission Control. If you watched objects go across the screen rapidly, you would see them, or their edges, break up into the three colors.
Ironically, the above system was essentially what the FCC had originally approved for color broadcasting back in 1950, but never implemented. Three years later, they adopted the system that we are still using for color broadcast.