Before Beta: Sony's 1969 "Camcorder"

the device in this bag is an incredibly important yet also utterly irrelevant piece of home video equipment it occupies a position in history where it should have been revolutionary but wasn't it has no purpose in the modern world it looks like a joke compared to what came right after it and almost nobody remembers it for what are probably pretty good reasons it is one of the most useless devices that i own in a lot of senses but it's also one of the coolest in my history of video documentary i talk about the sort of video tape that predated video cassette if you haven't watched that video then i wish you would i put so much work into it the short of it is that by the end of the 60s there were actually consumer videotape formats specifically and most significantly in 1969 the electronic industry association of japan developed a format that was widely accepted around the world for home video taping it took this type of video tape here it is a half inch videotape much like what came in later video cassettes except it's not in a video cassette it's just in an open reel i don't know what this is properly called but people just call it eia j and it was widely used around the world by anybody who was into video in the 60s and 70s sony put out the first ei aj recorder in 1969 and it probably wasn't a revolution for reasons you're going to see later in this video probably very few people actually bought one nonetheless it was the first video standard where you could buy a tape shoot video on it then take it to a friend's house and play it on their machine even if it was from a different manufacturer of course your friend had to have a machine which they didn't but if you were a huge nerd and you knew another huge nerd then you could do this and you couldn't do that before so that's pretty cool the specific model that sony put out in 1969 was the av 3400 also known as the portapak i don't know how many of these were made or how many sold but it was enough that they show up on ebay pretty frequently i bought one a couple years ago which i won't be showing to you because i blew it up in a very silly accident that i feel very bad about then i bought another one which does work and i will show it to you and here it is this is of course just the leatherette carrying case which is necessary to use the machine as intended as i'll explain later but let's get a look at the machine itself now originally this had a carrying handle across the front of the case it was good for getting it out of the bag but mine broke off a long time ago and the other one i have in storage is about most of the way to being broken off so i suggest if you get one of these that you don't ever carry it by the handle as you can see the styling is very 1960s it has a flip up cover on it which is important because there are so many exposed parts in here that if you were to drop something on this you'd certainly destroy it i don't think the cover only provides that much protection though it seems pretty thin to me so you probably don't want to drop this anyway there's two trunk latches over here for getting it off it's actually really inconvenient to do anything with the lid on but you can squeeze these two latches here to pop the hinge pins take the door off i should mention by the way the fit and finish this machine has suffered over the years the trim pieces were originally glued on but as you can see the glue failed and they started falling off and so the whole thing's very rattly would probably benefit from some tlc that i'm not very good at so here it is in all its complicated glory there's a lot of parts here especially under this cover and i'm going to try and explain what pretty much all of them do this machine records analog video on magnetic tape just like a vcr but different the biggest difference is that instead of using cassettes it's an open reel mechanism if you're familiar with quarter inch audio tape you might be familiar with the open reel concept instead of having a cassette that contains a pair of reels you have a pair of distinct reels and you have to load the tape into the machine by hand in case you're not familiar with an audio tape recorder let me show you how one of those works very briefly so you can see how different this is on this tape deck you can see up top we have two spindles which are these metal pegs these hold the two tape reels which are called the supply and take up when you set up to play or record a tape you take a reel out of the box put it on the supply side and thread it through the machine to thread it you pull the tape off the supply reel over a tension arm then a roller then the erase head record head play head cap stand and pinch roller another tension arm and finally you wind it around the take-up reel it sounds like a lot of parts but really what it comes down to is you just pull the tape off the supply reel loop it under the heads and up onto the take up it's very quick and simple once you're used to it as you play the tape it slowly winds onto the take-up reel and when you're done you can either swap them end to end to play the other side or rewind the tape all the way back onto the original supply reel and put it back in its box and that's pretty much all there is to it this video recorder has a lot of similarities but also some really big differences the first difference is that instead of using quarter inch tape this uses half inch tape which is simply twice as wide now with magnetic tape more width usually means higher bandwidth and that is true here but not for the same reason it would be in an audio tape machine i'll tell you more about why that is later when i got this machine it only came with the one reel and it's almost impossible to buy them now on ebay i think people take a look at these and just go oh it's a tape reel and throw it away because quarter inch tape reels are thick on the ground and worthless these aren't worth anymore but i think people just don't realize they're special fortunately my friend richard was able to make a 3d printed one for me without which i couldn't actually use this thing if you're ever in this situation i believe you can get this design on the thingiverse in a quarter inch machine the tape just goes under and around with this one it doesn't the way you actually thread the tape is you come down here and follow these arrows around here up here around here all the way up onto the take-up spool now that's a lot more steps than on an audio recorder the reason this is so circuitous has to do with the actual shape of the recording mechanism itself it's covered up by this plate here so i'll go ahead and pull it off we start getting into the filth and complexity of this machine there's plenty of bits and pieces down here but the money zone is this guy right here this is the video recording head and it's definitely completely alien compared to an audio tape machine but it's also pretty different compared to a typical vcr but in order to explain those differences i'm going to have to tell you a little bit about the theory of video recording if you just take a peek through the flap on a vhs deck you'll see immediately the most interesting thing about vhs which is the tilted metal cylinder in the back of the deck this is called the drum assembly and it contains anywhere from two to six video recording and playback heads these are tiny elements with coils on them that can either detect a magnetic signal on a tape or lay down a new one when you put a cassette into a vcr the tape inside the cassette is pulled out and wrapped around this drum which spins at somewhere over a thousand rpm it's highly polished so it doesn't produce much friction which allows the tape to slide smoothly around it as it passes through the machine as the drum spins the video heads are swept over the tape's surface at very high speed in order to achieve helical recording a conventional audio tape uses linear recording in which the audio signal is recorded as a continuous strip of varying magnetic fields along the whole length of the tape but this is usually a very narrow strip a 16th or a 32nd of an inch wide this is how we're able to get multiple channels onto an audio tape and even multiple sides you can flip it over and play a different set of tracks there's enough room on there to pack two or four or in professional settings sometimes as many as 16 or 32 tracks of audio onto a single tape with magnetic tape the speed at which it moves determines how much bandwidth you have when a tape moves faster past the recording head you can get higher frequency signals onto it with audio tape it usually moves at between 7 and 15 inches per second depending on how much quality the listener wants if you want to record video onto tape in a linear fashion you can't move it at 7 to 15 inches per second you need more like 200 you could just use normal tape and move it that fast that's what was done for early video tape experiments but if you look at this footage you can see that the tape reels themselves are gargantuan they're the size of parmesan wheels and they're moving so fast they're a blur this was not practical even for businesses but definitely not for consumers it just eats up tape too fast helical recording is a really cool solution for this problem since you need the tape to move past the head really fast but you don't need the recorded signal to be very wide you can trade the width of the tape for linear speed tim hunken demonstrated this way better than i possibly could in his 80s series the secret life of machines in which he takes a vhs drum assembly and replaces the actual heads with a pair of markers as he spins the drum the marker leaves a black line where the magnetic signal would normally be recorded as you can see the black lines appearing on the tape here are at a diagonal to the tape and as he moves the tape forward and spins the head again another black line gets laid down that's packed very closely next to the first one but doesn't overlap if you were to measure one of these strips it's something like eight inches long but since it's stored diagonally the tape only needs to be moved a 16th of an inch in order to make room for another strip to get laid down which means you're effectively getting 8 inches of tape space for only 1 16 inch of linear travel meanwhile because the heads are spinning so fast they're seeing the tape move past them relatively at 200 inches per second even though in reality it's only moving at maybe an inch a second so it makes sense mathematically that if you're using the full width of the tape instead of just a little bit you're going to be able to store more data on it but there's the problem that these are all distinct little stripes it's not one continuous signal so that seems pretty bad there's an interruption at the end of each track well the fortunate thing is that video also contains interruptions analog video is not a continuous signal it's sent as a series of distinct frames each one being a full screen picture with a small gap in between so the fact that each one of these is separate doesn't matter because each one is a self-contained frame of video the gap at the beginning and end can line up with the natural gaps that are in the video signal itself all the same you don't want much gap which is why the video drum has to contain at least two heads as one is coming off the bottom of the tape finishing one frame of video the next one is just starting to enter the top of the tape where it can begin the next frame of video this technology squeezes more bandwidth out of tape than should really be possible and it's an incredible achievement it's also absolutely mandatory it's the only way video has ever been recorded for production purposes going all the way back to the earliest era of videotape experiments in the mid 50s no one was ever able to get a practical videotape recorder working without using this technique so this recorder here is really no different than any other in its basic function but the details of how it achieves that helical recording are quite a lot different than any other videotape recorder you'll ever look at so let's get in here look at this thing and see why it's so different than a vcr this here is the video drum let me take this guard off so you can see the edge of the drum in a vhs machine i'd be able to put my finger on the edge of this drum and spin it but here no dice it's completely fixed in place but let me take the top cover off the drum and show you why that is instead of the entire drum rotating the heads themselves are mounted on this armature called the scanner and this armature spins inside the drum assembly this slot here allows the heads to come into contact with the tape if i spin them around you can see that they just barely protrude from the slot so they would touch the tape with just the slightest pressure when i load the tape on this machine it's going to be wrapped around this drum so instead of the drum spinning the heads inside spin and the drum just provides a path for the tape to follow it does still spin just as fast as a vhs head however i do wonder why they were using this approach of the stationary drum instead of a spinning one the technology had been invented in fact at the same time this was being sold sony was selling pneumatic decks that were using video cassette and spinning heads it really just looked like larger versions of vhs i have to guess that this was done for cost savings you don't have to balance any of this stuff you only have to balance the internal armature which is probably a lot easier and cheaper to do by hand but now let's look at the other difference between this and a vcr if you look at the drum from the side you'll see it's not tilted now i just finished saying that all videotape is helically scanned so was i lying nope the tape is scanned helically just not by tilting the head i'll go ahead and thread it now and show you how that works so we start with the tape on the supply reel get it loose here and pull off a couple feet now first it has to go under this guide pin here that keeps it taut then it goes over this roller and around this roller here now this is the pinch roller it squeezes the tape against the cap stand and allows it to be pulled through the machine we come up around here and over this guide pin here now this guide pin specifically is not straight i'll show you a close-up of that where you can see that it actually has a bevel on it and it's kind of hard to see but i believe that all the following components here are tilted back a little bit because this is where the tape begins to curve it's given a little bit of a tilt which makes it want to wrap and to wrap in a downward angle so we go across the erase head here over another guide now we wrap the tape around the video drum and it spirals downward as it goes with the tape now wrapped around the drum in a spiral even though the slot is in a straight line compared to the rest of the machine relative to the tape it's a diagonal and that way we get our helical recording this is also why if you notice the reels are at different heights because the tape actually descends as it wraps around the head then it lands on a guide pin here then we go over the audio recording head now we should pause here for a moment and mention that the audio recording head does not spin it is not part of the video head assembly so the video head puts the video on there and then the bottom part of the tape gets overwritten with a continuous ordinary channel of audio however because the tape is still passing this head at a diagonal the head is actually tilted slightly so that it'll be at the same azimuth as the tape then we go up around another guide pin and make another corner and again we have a flared bushing here because it has to guide the tape at the same angle around the whole corner and then we go under the tape sense bail this is a little spring-loaded rod which presses against the tape and if the tape runs out then this will snap forward and shuts off the whole machine finally we come up over this pin here and we can begin to wrap around the take up reel now i'm going to do that off camera because this one originally had i believe a sticky rubber center coating but it doesn't anymore so it's really fiddly to get the tape on here all right and with the tape threaded on here we're now ready to record easy as pie anyone could do it so now we're threaded up and after getting the incredibly fiddly cover back on the mechanism we're ready to play some video i hooked up the ancient linear power supply that's somehow still working let's give it a shot the machine is absolutely cacophonous here get a taste it makes a terrible racket which is probably one of the reasons it has the lid because it is a lot quieter with it on it's a little better but you still wouldn't want to use this thing at the opera the video output itself is actually pretty clean i'll show you some close-ups later but here it is playing some seinfeld that i dubbed on here and while that's anachronistic this was one of the options for using this machine you can buy a television input adapter for it and use it to take tv shows six years before betamax came out made a big deal out of doing the exact same thing the only other real controls here are fast forward and rewind which i don't want to engage right away because i'm really worried i might break the machine neither one of them show you a picture while in operation but i think they're actually supposed to this machine is just not in the best condition so something's wrong with the timing circuitry also if you have the machine stopped and you hold the still image lever before going into play mode it'll run the head without running the reels since the tape isn't moving we have a rudimentary pause mode but one where you can actually move the reels by hand to slide between frames now this is a feature that would become available on professional video decks fairly quickly but wouldn't actually be available in the consumer market for 20 to 30 years the fact you could use this for things like sports replays and golf stroke analysis and that sort of thing probably put this in the houses of a number of people who otherwise had no interest in video as wild as this machine looks when you first glance at it it's really pretty simple like i think i could have designed it and that's saying a lot you want the tape to go a diagonal just bend it who cares nothing matters what's funny about this is just that it's not terribly different from vhs and it's actual functionality it's just that vhs has 10 times more parts entirely because of its automatic loading mechanism since you thread this thing by hand it doesn't need any of the motors cams gears steppers all the stuff that makes vhs complicated really just comes down to getting the tape wrapped around the head once you've done that it's just this and in fact even though i said this is different than an audio tape player it's not really that much more complex most of the parts are the same they've just been wrapped around this video drum if you just replace the video drum with a normal linear tape head you just have a quarter inch audio recorder in fact the controls aren't even any different as you saw it only has forward backward and stop not really anything else there's no extra controls because this thing has no intelligence think about a vcr when you press eject all this stuff has to happen if the tape is playing then the machine has to stop and unthread the tape wait for the head to spin down and has to put the tape back into the cassette close the door push the tape up and spit it out the front all these little mechanisms have to move at their own pace in exactly the right order otherwise the whole thing goes to hell this machine does none of that the controls are fully manual take the play lever for instance when you shift it into play it's not asking the machine to go into play mode it closes an electrical switch that powers up the transport and video head motors that's it it just plugs them into power it physically moves a rubber roller to couple the transport motor to the tape spindles this is the sort of mechanism you'd find inside of a record player from the 50s fast forward closes a different switch that makes the motors go faster and rewind moves a different roller which drives the supply rail backwards the record switch energizes the video recording circuitry so that when you put it in play as the head is spinning it'll record instead of playing there's also the still switch which just interrupts power to the real motors and then there's the sound dub switch which just interrupts power to the video recording circuitry but leaves the audio circuitry energized that's it these few functions are all this machine can do and most of what they're doing isn't electronic it's just moving levers and rollers in fact because it's all levers and rollers it ages just like a 1940s turntable when i got this machine sure enough about half the controls were all gummed up i could push on the audio dubbing lever and it would just stay stuck over to the left because all the nasty brown grease inside had dried up and turned into glue likewise the record lever would return very slowly from the record position so i had to open the machine up and scrub all the surfaces to get all the gunk out of it it took way longer than i ever would have expected from a piece of video equipment you think of video gear as being full of tiny delicate parts but this thing just looks like an ancient transmission inside they glop the grease on these joints like they were building a caterpillar bulldozer i'm surprised it doesn't have zerk fittings i had to pop this e-clip here at which point i found out it was also caked in grease i pulled apart the mechanism under it got under it with the isopropyl alcohol and just scrubbed and scrubbed on it to get all this stuff off i tried my best with the record lever as well though it's really tough to get in there without doing way more disassembly than i'm prepared for after a while i had all the levers freed up and moving it's just beyond strange to me after working with vcrs for most of my life to open up a machine like this and see that it's all just dumb barbarian pieces of sheet metal pushing on each other and to accept that this somehow records a moving picture it's just really tough for me video feels like it should be too sophisticated for this to work but it does don't get me wrong there are electronics in there but most of this thing's bulk seems to be made out of levers and pulleys and belts it's like a steampunk vcr now before we get too excited we should see how this actually performs and to do that we're going to need a video input now as i said earlier you could use this to record live television but that's not really what it was for this was intended to be used as a portable video recorder you were supposed to take this to birthday parties and parades and soccer matches so it is the forerunner of the modern camcorder the carrying case has cutouts which expose the ports so you can connect the camera and the controls so you can operate the machine while carrying it around there's also connections on the back for a backpack straps so you can carry it around for long periods without the imbalanced weight of a shoulder strap there's also this little pouch on the side for an earbud so you can monitor your audio in the field this is a sort called a crystal earpiece which uses a little piezoelectric diaphragm to make sound these were pretty much the only kind of earbud that existed at this time and they had the benefit of being very loud even with a very low power signal on the machine itself there's a door on the bottom which unscrews and allows you to install a lead acid battery which i definitely don't have in fact i had to build an adapter cord to hook this up to a lithium ion pack and that's how i killed my first machine i was hooking it up to a battery pack and i got the leads backwards for just an instant and blew every transistor in the device i had double checked and triple checked but i should have quadruple checked now i have a battery pack that has labels all over it that say where to put in the negative and the positive and i still double and triple check every single time but at any rate the av-3400 was sold as a portable video recording system so it came with a camera the avc 3400 this is that i really like how the recorder and the camera have the exact same visual style it makes sense since they were being sold together but it's particularly nice because at this time companies have not yet switched to monochromatic paint jobs so we get this sort of cream instead of just white or gray and we get this nice red down here i'd love to show you how this thing works except it doesn't it doesn't actually produce a picture and the crt on the back just produces a really messed up raster i suspect that it's close to working it probably just needs a recap or something but that's way beyond my capabilities with some electronics i could pull it off but this thing is just a completely tangled mess of tied up bundles of wire and point-to-point connections and really dense through-hole circuitry that's way beyond my skill set this won't be a problem i have other cameras that work but let's take a look at what sony was shipping with this recorder anyway this camera is black and white and is based around a kind of vacuum tube technology called a vidicon which is actually a sort of cathode ray tube that captures an image instead of displaying one the tube is kind of buried in the circuitry but you can just make it out inside the camera here it's basically a tv tube running in reverse and it's a technology i've been dying to explain to you for years i'll get around to it eventually but just like more recent cameras it outputs a normal composite television signal so this is just a video camera as i mentioned a few times before prior to the invention of the camcorder all cameras used an identical 10 pin plug with a standard pin out it carries a bunch of signals like video in and out audio in and out a record on off signal and power this connector was used on hundreds of cameras but this one might have been the first that actually intended to use this as a standard connector or i think more likely in classic sony style the standard that everyone used was just whatever sony was already doing on the back we have a built-in crt viewfinder probably about an inch across typical pretty much all cameras prior to the 90s and on the front of course we have the lens now this lens here is a pretty typical c-mount lens that you'd find on most video cameras or even some security cameras you could actually interchange this with others although i've tried putting this lens on my other c-mount cameras and like the the flange focal distance isn't right in here you can actually see the face of the video tube it's not much to look at but yeah that's the front of a crt i do love how absolutely beefy this mount is i don't know why it's this big and actually this here unscrews for some reason this reveals that this thing is just built like a tank there's this massive brass mounting ring up here and i suspect that some of this is probably for for tuning this in some way maybe like aligning the tube or something i don't know again much like the rest of this machine it's pretty barbarian it also has this enormous mic diaphragm up here i have no idea what's behind this and at this time this really should have been a little tiny electric mic so i don't know why this thing is so big the only other thing on here is this guy here which is the record start stop button and that's it there's not much else to look at now there's no great way to hold this camera and that's because it's actually not complete you're supposed to mount it on a tripod or for handheld use you're supposed to use the original included pistol grip this here is the pistol grip for handheld use it actually screws into the tripod socket and it also screws in right where the cable is i have no idea why they decided to put the cable uh here instead of maybe on on the back of the camera i don't know what that decision was but consequently this actually runs into it but they've put this hole here and a little routing slot in the back so to install this you put the cable through the hole and then run the tripod screw down it's a kind of an awkward design but it works now there's a pair of rods here which flip out from the grip and i assumed that these would make the camera sit straight up on a table as a little mini tripod but they don't they just make it sit at this weird angle and i don't really know why i'm not sure what this is for i guess if you were like i don't know taking video of a sports game and you were up on the high balcony you could put this up on a table and it would shoot down towards the field i can't think of any other possible use for it it's not just to hold the camera up off a surface because it lays just fine i mean it's just sheet metal who cares i can't make any sense of this bipod and there's no mention of it in the manual that i've seen now this trigger here tells the camera to start and stop recording but there's no electrical connection between this grip and the camera instead when you squeeze this it just pushes on the same rod that operates the start stop switch on the camera itself pretty clever right now when you press this switch it connects to 12 volts that's running the camera to one of the pins in the eij connector which goes back to the recorder and activates a solenoid which presses the pinch roller against the cap stand grabbing the tape and pulling it through the machine if you press it again it releases the pinch roller and the tape is no longer being pulled through the machine so you're paused so that's the tour of the camera itself it's very bare bones it looks nice it was probably reasonably decent when it was new it just doesn't really do very much all the smarts are in the recorder itself now while we want to test that recorder and i do have other cameras that'll plug into it i can't just pick any one of them if you want to get a sense of what using this machine was like when it was new for instance i have a hitachi camera here from 1984 it also has an eia j plug on it it'll plug into this recorder and it'll record video just fine but it's not going to show you what using this recorder was like when it was new but hey let's see how that looks over the weekend i took this camera and recorder to a friend's birthday party by the way since i don't have the original battery like i said i had to build an adapter to run this off a 12-volt lithium pack that i have and i had to have a friend carry it behind me the whole time like a machine gun loader here in the almost direct sunlight outside you can make out my friend and his kid and the cars and houses behind him it's black and white and kind of blurry and ghosty but it's mostly passable then i go into the house but notice as i go inside the house the camera adjusts to the much lower light level just fine you don't even notice that it's 100 times dimmer inside than outside you're probably used to this from your smartphone camera but it's not actually how things worked in 1969. this camera from 69 and the scammer from 84 are both based on video tube technology and video tubes used to have very poor light sensitivity it's just that this one is from 1984 when they'd made big strides in that particular problem if i compare it to a camera from just a few years earlier in 1981 the difference is night and day why am i talking about these it'll all make sense in a couple minutes don't worry this footage is being recorded on my 1984 camera plugged into the videotape recorder i've just been showing you under the normal office lighting in my studio as i say i turned off my great big led floodlights so if you were in a 1969 household it wasn't going to be much brighter than this and probably quite a bit dimmer now this may not look incredible it probably doesn't look as good as your smartphone does but it looks passable you know if you were shooting video at a party and it looked like this it would probably be okay but now this is my 1981 camera under the same lighting conditions and it's atrocious i look like i'm in the movie pie the light fall off in contrast is just awful and this is what you could expect from that original 1969 camera it really wouldn't perform very well indoors you were expected to shoot under extremely bright video lights like these which weren't really practical for use in casual settings or you were supposed to shoot outdoors out here in the direct sunlight this camera performs much better than it did indoors and this is the kind of performance you could expect from the camera that came with the av 3400 so you weren't really going to have the mid 80s experience of shooting hours of party footage indoors and dimly lit houses to upload to youtube 25 years later for future generations to enjoy you could maybe shoot video of a parade or your kids soccer match but that was about it what's interesting about this is that the low quality of these cameras really did the recorder dirty let me show you what i mean let's go back to the machine itself for the moment to make this thing usable for my purposes in the modern world i had to make a couple modifications first i needed to get a video output jack so i could capture the footage that i'd recorded on here for this video but this doesn't have a video output because in 1969 televisions didn't have video inputs nobody had a use for that sort of thing so tvs only had an antenna input i addressed this in my previous video about how the nes is actually a little television transmitter sony used the same solution they used an rf modulator which plugs into a bay on the bottom of the machine and then connects to the antenna input on your television and you just tune to channel three or four or whatever rf modulators require a baseband video input to function however so i knew i could tee off of one of the pins here to get my video output and sure enough the pins on the modulator are actually labeled so i didn't have to do any work to figure out which one was which i sought it on a pair of rcas and i can now get clean audio and video out of the machine but i also built an adapter cable so i could get video into the machine i had a spare ei aj extension laying around so i took one end off and started on a breadboard and a couple rca cables that's how i was able to get seinfeld on here i plugged this into my raspberry pi and dubbed it from an avi other than the distortions from the machine being old the tape being beat up and of course the lack of color it looks basically like a vhs recording the resolution looks fine in other words it seems like the recorder captures excellent quality footage but unless you were taping tv shows you wouldn't have known that back when it was new because the only cameras available at the time were terrible and also the quality of the picture from tube cameras is bad in ways that go beyond the light sensitivity problems for instance here's the raw output from the better of my videotube cameras the 1984 one and as you can see even under excellent studio lighting and the ideal possible conditions it doesn't look very good it's blurry and the colors are washed out and it just kind of looks ghosty this as far as i can tell is just how video tube cameras were i mean it's possible that all of mine are just suffering the effects of age but the trouble with that is we have footage from back when these things were new and it doesn't seem like they looked much better back then either this for instance is from the video freaks whose footage i've used before because they're one of the better examples of well-preserved early amateur video this was shot in about 1973 and very possibly on the original abc 3400 camera and you can tell it still has the same problems the focus might be a little better but the dynamic range isn't great so there's blown out areas where there's direct sunlight and it's often muddy and hard to see what's going on i've looked at a few other rips of eia video and they all seem to share similar problems so it really looks like the state of the art in consumer cameras was just garbage for almost two decades like i copped to earlier these things probably had very little impact on the consumer market and now having seen all this footage you can probably guess why i think the cameras just hamstrung them and kept them from being as popular as they could have been eight millimeter and sixteen millimeter film movie cameras couldn't record for as long but otherwise the quality was far and away superior at least from what i've seen supporting this notion the two machines i have both have asset tags on them from universities so they weren't bought by consumers they were probably bought either by a film department or like a journalism class so people could do mock television interviews that sort of thing but either way they weren't being used to film birthday parties and soccer matches you could certainly haul this igloo cooler size thing out to your kids soccer match and sit there for an hour rolling tape but when you get home you're not going to be able to make out where the ball is so these things probably weren't flying off the shelves for that purpose also you might be wondering why i haven't played any of the audio recorded on the machine if you didn't notice i've just been using the lapel mic that's because the machine expects a really low amplitude audio signal and all my cameras output and amplified one for some reason uh so if i play it back off the tape it sounds like this so that's the first real consumer video recorder in a nutshell on the one hand it didn't really matter i don't think anybody really bought it other than institutions that sort of thing on the other hand it has such intense cultural energy i just can't not be impressed by it i feel like i should have more to say despite photography and in fact the moving picture being over 70 years old when this thing came out the era of eternal recording of the implicit capture of all of life's moments onto videotape was nowhere close to beginning this machine was supposed to kick-start it was supposed to put a video camera in every consumer's hands but that didn't happen and it would take the invention of video cassette and the camcorder nearly 15 years later before it happened this thing didn't ultimately really matter but it is a hell of a conversation piece if you liked this video please subscribe to my channel it'll let me know you like this sort of thing if you want to know when i release new stuff remember to turn on notifications a lot of people forget they can do that if you want to support me so i can get more stuff like this uh consider going to my patreon um there's a lot of people on there who are sending me money that i use to get this sort of thing without which i couldn't do this kind of video so i'm really grateful to all of them and i'm grateful to everybody else for watching thank you so much

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude

Views: 110,093

Rating: 4.9401436 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: yddRRExWEvs

Length: 34min 11sec (2051 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Two-Tone-]

Not your usual post for here, but I found this video and its deep dive into its tech, how it works, and general history to be really enjoyable.

[u/Aleblanco1987]

it's amazing to see how far we've come since then

[u/xenago]

This channel consistently has great videos

[u/iDontSeedMyTorrents]

This guy is a really great presenter.