Distinguished DCS Advisory Board Member Larry Thorpe will soon retire from his position as Senior Fellow at Canon, USA after a long and illustrious career. His contributions to the advancement of broadcast, HD and Digital Cinema image capture are innumerable. Larry originally hales from Ireland where he studied engineering at the College of Technology in Dublin. After a run with the BBC in London, he went to work at RCA which brought him to the US in the 1960s. He became the project manager for the TK-47 color camera introduced in 1979 as the first automatic color studio camera. The TK-47 used a computer to complete all of the major setup functions, saving engineers countless hours they once spent tweaking equipment. With 10 patents under his belt, Larry moved to Sony in 1982 where he helped launch the BVP-360 and a number of compact ENG style cameras including the Betacam, that were early adopters of the CCD, (charge coupled device,) imager.
After a celebrated career with Sony, the accomplished engineer became the consummate lens expert, moving to Canon, where he has served until now as one of the industy’s leading authorities on optics and lenses. Larry has racked up a lot of honors in his career; he is a Life Fellow of SMPTE, a winner of the David Sarnoff Award for his innovations in automatic studio color cameras, and more recently the Charles F. Jenkins EMMY Lifetime Achievement Award. He received the Montreux 2000 Gold Medal Award for Digital Cinematography, the NAB 2001 Television Engineering Achievement Award, the Society of Television Engineers (STE) 2001 award, and in 2004 the Broadcasting & Cable Technical Leadership Award. Congratulations to Larry Thorpe for a stellar career and tireless service to the industry including our own Digital Cinema Society.
See this short excerpt from a DCS interview with Larry at the 2015 CES Show where he recounts some of the technology highlights from his career:
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