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The video camera tube was a type of cathode ray tube used to capture the television image prior to the introduction of charge-coupled devices (CCDs) in the 1970s. Several different types of tubes were in use from the early 1930s to the 1980s.

In these tubes, the cathode ray was scanned across an image of the scene to be broadcast. The resultant current was dependent on the brightness of the image on the target. The size of the striking ray was tiny compared to the size of the target, allowing 483 horizontal scan lines per image in the NTSC format, or 576 lines in PAL.

Any vacuum tube which operates using a focused beam of electrons, "cathode rays", is known as a cathode ray tube (CRT). However, in the popular "CRT" usually refers to the "picture tube" in a CRT television. With the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s, "cathode ray tube" (quickly replaced by the acronym "CRT") became the word used for the display, which looked like a small television. It is only one of many types of cathode ray tubes. Other CRTs include the tubes used in television, oscilloscopes, or radar displays. The camera pickup tubes described in this article are also CRTs, but they display no image, and are not kinescopes.

In June 1908, the scientific journal Nature published a letter in which Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, fellow of the Royal Society (UK), discussed how a fully electronic television system could be realized by using cathode ray tubes (or "Braun" tubes, after its inventor, Karl Braun) as both imaging and display devices. He noted that the "real difficulties lie in devising an efficient transmitter", and that it was possible that "no photoelectric phenomenon at present known will provide what is required". A cathode ray tube was successfully demonstrated as a displaying device by the German Professor Max Dieckmann in 1906, his experimental results were published by the journal Scientific American in 1909. Campbell-Swinton later expanded on his vision in a presidential address given to the Röntgen Society in November 1911. The photoelectric screen in the proposed transmitting device was a mosaic of isolated rubidium cubes. His concept for a fully electronic television system was later popularized by Hugo Gernsback as the "Campbell-Swinton Electronic Scanning System" in the August 1915 issue of the popular magazine Electrical Experimenter.

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