Yeah, they used telecentric lenses; for the prism block to work properly, you have to have each principal ray across the lens perpendicular to the filter. This puts very rough optical constraints on the lens; a typical video camera lens would have dozens of elements arranged in many groups, while an equivalent 'cine' lens might have half or fewer elements.

And on top of that, the lenses produced ugly images. Going to single chip designs was a big upgrade in image quality, mostly for optical reasons.