Hitachi's 1997 Videotape Killer (Not Really)

hi there this is the hitachi mpeg-1 a digital camcorder from 1997 pretty early for a device like that i bought this at my local junk store having no idea what it was the price was ripe it's cute and i like camcorders got it home and started looking into it and found that it's probably a pretty important piece of the history of digital video recording i've never heard of it for reasons that will become obvious but despite its flaws of which it has several it's still i think an important part of history demonstrates what was going to come but came too early to start a revolution a revolution that would in fact take much longer than i think anybody anticipated the consumer electronics industry who are cowards nowadays used to be mad lads who didn't care if things were impossible and would produce a product that didn't actually work just to get something to the shelves before anybody else often through massive feats of technological ingenuity only to produce a product that didn't really do what it was supposed to do but did technically check the boxes this is i feel the story of the hitachi which is the earliest all-digital video camera that i'm aware of rather than being a repurposed still camera that can also shoot video it is a video camera that happens to include a still feature hitachi was so dedicated to this being a video camera that they actually call it the mpeg cam in the manual and the model number is mpeg-1 which if you're not aware was an incredibly popular video codec at this time this camera makes no compromises that would interfere with its ability to shoot video which is not to say that it does not make a lot of compromises let's take a look at the unit itself i have to say it's one of the most pleasing gadgets i've ever owned in a number of different ways first of all it's built like a brick house all the panels are metal the fit and finish is second to none it doesn't rattle and it has weight to it it feels like a lump of steel or perhaps guilt you don't forget it's in your hand but in a good way while this kind of chassis can scratch easily hitachi included these two big rubber ridges on the back which i'm pleased to report have not turned to goo these just serve to keep it from sliding around or getting scraped up on a hard surface and notionally make it stick a little better in the hand since frankly you have to have gigantic mitts like mine to palm this thing it doesn't have a side strap or anything so you have to grip it at all times which is a negative point i have remarked before on how every time a new medium comes out camera designers decide that cameras don't need to be camera shaped this one is guilty of that but i think it feels pretty good despite not being vaguely camera shaped i think the controls are laid out ergonomically at least for me i can reach everything just fine and the controls fall in comfortable places the buttons are all pretty positive and clearly labeled well there is a reason they can fit all the labels on this control panel so neatly which i will touch on later on the side here we have the usual record versus play selector that's on every video camera and i should note every time you turn this device on or off there is a deafening click which seems to be something in the camera mechanism itself maybe some kind of protective internal cover but it really gets noticeable as you're using it feels bad every time you make it happen below the mode switch is a big rubber flap that's really tough to get open and it covers up this horrifying proprietary connector so if you have the cables for this thing don't lose them you can never replace them if you've got one put the cables in a little zip lock along with the camera someone will thank you someday on the other side we have a dc input just a plain dc jack you could just shove power into it even if the battery is dead below that is a speaker a fairly sizable one which is another indicator this is a dedicated video camera since there wouldn't be that much use for one of these on a still camera below that we have the battery now ironically despite the fact that i was just talking about how rare dc jacks are because the batteries for old cameras always die and they're usually just screwed without them this battery pack is actually still good now i'm telling you that this battery holds a charge i'm i'm not saying that it turns the camera on for a minute or so and then shuts off i'm saying that i used this for all my test shooting for this video on one charge that's over 30 minutes of shooting and for reasons it will become obvious that's pretty impressive really though it's just shocking to find any 90s era lithium pack that's still working i mean i don't think i've ever seen this before what black magic is going on here now below that we've got the cover for the media now it's kind of unusual you've got to unscrew this little retaining screw here and then this guy pops up and then this flops off and you think it'd be hinged down here but it isn't it's just sort of free-floating so you can just lose it now that seems odd but it's partially because of how unusual the storage itself is this takes a pcm cia hard drive pcmcia or pc card was originally a memory and storage format and this sort of thing was not uncommon at the time it's an actual spinning hard disk about two inches in diameter with a 216 megabyte capacity which beat any kind of flash memory available at that time so this was a significant chunk of data in these days and the reason that it's awkward to get out of the camera is you're not really supposed to take it out for reasons that we'll go into later this is supposed to just kind of stay in the camera just live there throughout the whole lifetime of the thing ideally and you're not supposed to just unplug it and shove it into your computer like an sd card every time you want to get your videos off there are other ways to do that so it sort of makes sense that this just gets bolted in like this because it's really meant to be kind of a component of the camera itself one bummer i'll warn you about if you want to get one of these yourself is i don't think it works correctly with flash media i tried putting one of these cf to pcmcia adapters in here and while it does recognize it and it will work in some modes the main video mode does not function on this it refuses to actually record video so if you want to get one of these if it doesn't come with the hard drive you're going to have to prepare to find the correct hard drive for it finally on top we've got the actual camera lens assembly which you'll notice is facing us because this in fact has a selfie mode much like some contemporary camcorders like the sharp view cam this will rotate so you can film someone else or you can film yourself or you can film somebody to your left i guess when it's in the rear facing position you'll notice that it's not actually flat it's tilted a little bit and i think this is just so you can hold the camera at a slightly more natural angle an odd thing about this camera it has no lens cap that i could find no lens cover internally or automatically and there's no filter threads so you can't put on like a uv filter or anything so if you drop this thing you're going to destroy the lens and there's nothing you can do about it the camera came with a few accessories and among those is this guy it's a little plastic stand you can set the camera in to use it on a surface now this is kind of unusual you'd think they would just include a little tiny tripod but i don't think there were many of those at that time i don't i don't think very many people had a use for them because gopros and video cameras of this size had not yet been invented but it's a little peculiar to me that they didn't just make their own instead of this big injection molded plastic thing that's got a steel plate on the bottom still it is a nice stable way to hold the camera and maybe the selling point over a tripod is that it tilts but it doesn't roll it stays horizontal so if you're using this on a desk you're probably recording yourself with it you're going to set it up here and then tilt it up so it gets a good shot of you and you're not going to want to roll at all you're only going to want the tilt so maybe that's the reasoning the battery charger is typical for the era you've got the battery mount here on the side and on the other side you've got this jack into which you can plug a cable to supply power to the camera hence the dc jack on the side however there was a frustrating thing about virtually every power supply of this type it can charge your battery it can run the camera but when you plug this cable in it turns off the battery charger this is tremendously frustrating because what you wish you could do is run the camera off the dc plug while your battery charges and then put the battery back in once it's fully charged but you can't do that and on top of that if you put your battery in here but you leave the dc cable plugged in overnight because you forgot to unplug it your battery is just going to sit there and do nothing and in the morning instead of having a usable battery you're going to have a still dead one i hate that so many manufacturers did this the camera also came with a pop-out hood for the lcd so you snap this on here doesn't really snap and then when you're out in strong sunlight you can just flip that guy up and it shades the screen very nice feature this was not a common thing on camcorders because they all had eyepiece viewfinders at the time even if they also had flip out lcds so if you couldn't use one you could stick your eye up against the other but since this one only has the main lcd if you can't see it this camera is useless it also of course came with an av cable plugs into the multi-pin connector on the side here and then you can connect it to someone's television this was commonplace with camcorders because they often used formats that people didn't have players for like vhsc or high 8 or video 8. and with this particular device it's advantageous because this device produces nothing that you can put into any standalone video playback device so if somebody didn't have a computer the only thing you could do to show them video was to plug this into their tv so that's almost everything this came with not a ton of accessories but fairly valuable ones there's one other accessory that we'll look at later but first let's see how the camera itself functions operation is pretty dead simple you put in cam mode to record now it takes a few seconds to start up as you can see because it's spinning up the disc and checking its contents i admit this has already led to me missing a sudden event that i wanted to record so it is a downside with the apparent longevity of the battery pack you could just leave it turned on in idle but i'm pretty sure it'll spin the disc down eventually and it would take just as long to spin it back up i'll spin this to the side here so you can actually see something the lcd is pretty bright and clear it's got decent resolution and refresh rate doesn't smear too bad but it doesn't have very good contrast in strong sunlight it often looks like parts of the image are massively overexposed when in fact they look just fine when you review the footage the on-screen display can be turned off of course but it is pretty information dense you've got the recording state recording speed date and time battery state remaining record time current length of recording and then the recording mode of which there are four this is video and then there's still continuous and audio the video mode is 352 by 240 30 fps at a fixed 1.5 megabits now i don't know how this will look but if it looks decent just wait till you see the rest of the footage it's showing its good side right now still images are 704 by 480 jpegs which look like this the continuous still mode can shoot at about 2 frames per second for a maximum 5 frame burst and you can get about 3 000 jpegs on the hard drive in the best case the last mode audio allows you to take a picture and then record audio to go with it so this is 32 kilohertz 128 kbit mono mpeg audio which actually sounds pretty good and you can record up to four hours of it on this hard drive which is interesting because i'm not sure you could buy a portable hard drive based audio recorder of any kind at any price in 1997. so i suspect that this actually had longer run time than any other portable recorder in existence that's not my wheelhouse so i could easily be wrong but i think it's possible now the audio is sadly probably the best part of this device because as a camera it's basically photographers kryptonite one of the reasons for this comes back to what i was saying earlier about the control panel it's very nice and clean and neat because there aren't any actual controls on it if you notice there's no macro flower no focus control of any kind no exposure no white balance nothing all the controls on this camera are fully automated even if you delve into the menus there's nothing in here that actually affects how it records just some simple lcd adjustments formatting the card setting the date etc the only thing that affects how it records is the record type which can be set to clip which just means that it will only record when you hold down the record button like an old film movie camera this is terrible news to any photographer or videographer really i think anyone who's ever touched a camera would be aghast to see this but i don't think all the controls in the world would have saved this camera from the problems that show up once you actually look at the footage let's do that now for start sees let's just take a walk outside now pausing right here this freeze frame doesn't look all that bad yeah it's very low resolution but it's not jarring it just looks like a low res photo and you can more or less make out what's going on but now let's open the door right away things are much worse some of it is about what we'd expect well you can make out the shape of the compost bin the text on the site is illegible and of course the bushes are a jumbled mess if you have any knowledge of video codecs it won't be shocking that the details suffer horribly in low bit rate video but it gets worse it's hard to make out what kind of vehicles are parked outside for instance the telephone pole in front of the white truck is just a meaningless blur and the colors everywhere are atrocious this is garbage this is nothing it's not just bad it's useless at times it seems almost reasonable for instance i went out on the street and recorded a vlog something this camera is suited for with the rotating lens and the smartphone-like hand posture it feels like it was made for this purpose and for some reason the macro blocking is nearly invisible here you hardly notice it on the other hand in my backyard the texture of the plant life just wreaks havoc on the codec and my face is almost unrecognizable in a slow pan across the sky you can see the compression nose dive when the foliage comes into view then the image softens when it leaves again when shooting these miserable little flowers things go from shredded to ok to shred it again with what feels like little rhyme or reason even images that i think are less complex end up rendering much more poorly than others and there is a logic behind this i'm sure but i don't have the eye for it and i would expect very few consumers would have either i was worried that this was happening because of my specific environments maybe it just looks bad in direct sunlight in my backyard so i wanted to go try a completely different venue welcome to the forest i'm vlogging from the forest this is cougar mountain one of washington's unspeakably beautiful forests if you can't get good-looking footage out here you can't get it anywhere i realize this is a little unfair to the mpeg cam which we can already tell does better in less complex environments like my basement studio but what good is a camcorder if you can't take it anywhere interesting sadly the compression issues are just as bad here it's not something magic about my backyard that was doing it dirty and that's really a shame because this place looks incredible if you brought your camcorder to visit somewhere that looked like this but the footage you brought back looked like this you would return that camcorder even when it feels like the codec is doing better than usual the image is still incredibly muddy and i don't think the resolution itself is to blame 352 by 240 is nominally similar to vhs it should be able to replicate most typical scenes in a lifelike fashion yet that doesn't happen here watching these planes take off you'd be hard-pressed to even identify their manufacturers they're really fuzzy which i think is largely the fault of the encoding although this is a good time to point out that the lens is really not helping things a massive super zoom lens would have alleviated the resolution and encoding problems to some extent by allowing you to make small objects dominate the frame getting the best bang for your bit rate buck but instead you're limited to this laughable 3x zoom digital zoom claims to get it up to 6x but that only works when your sensor has more pixels than are being recorded in the file which this one doesn't so digital zoom just makes the picture more pixelated conversely the camera also has absolutely pitiful close focus the manual states that the minimum distance is 11 inches which is why these flower clips look so terrible you simply can't focus closer than a foot which is incredible for something with such a tiny sensor and the only explanation i have is that the lens does not actually do any focusing i think it's fixed at infinity which sucks really bad the colors are also not great as you can see from the blown out livery on the tail of this plane and i can tell you that the green on the other plane is also not right at all this would seem to actually be the fault of the camera itself since still photos the same scene look just as muddy and awful to try to prove this i hooked up the av output to a high quality portable recorder and went out again to see if the picture looked better if i bypassed the mpeg cams encoding circuitry and the answer is a resounding yes ignoring the improvements from the superior compression everything else is better the color sharpness contrast and detail are all improved as well as the frame rate it's a full 60i which makes me think that the camera is not a native digital unit but an ordinary analog one connected to a crappy digitizer which is trashing the image even before it makes it to the mpeg cam's awful encoder so many of this camera's problems could probably have been alleviated with a better ad converter that said the mpeg cam itself did do a lot better here than anywhere else i tried probably due to there being much less distinct foliage in the scene but i don't think that really gets it off the hook i admit this is probably a much less adversarial environment than the other ones i tested in and the footage probably looks a lot better but what's the point of a camcorder where you don't know if the footage is going to be usable until you get it home and look at it at that point you might as well just shoot on film in scenes with fast motion the camera does a little better simply because detail is not as important and you don't have time to pixel peep anyway but even then the pictures simply do not look good and i think it's safe to say that this camera would not really have been useful for anything as well built as this camera is and for whatever clever features it offers it all just falls apart when you look at what it actually records and almost entirely due to poor compression so how and why did this happen what it comes down to i believe is that this device just doesn't have the processing power to encode the video effectively see it uses mpeg-1 but neither the codec nor the bit rate nor the resolution are an excuse for how bad it looks for instance this extremely misleading sample video from the cd which you definitely could not produce with this camera looks outstanding really it's detailed lifelike smooth more than watchable but it's at the same resolution and lower bit rate than the mpeg cam it's only 1100 kilobits instead of the mpeg cam's 1600 or so so how is it so much better well a property of mpeg and many other codecs is that they only specify the format of the file not the method used to produce it as a result there are many different approaches to encoding it and the amount of computational power you put into it determines the quality of the output i can illustrate this here's a video that i shot with my cell phone at 4k in h.264 now let's take that same video and crush it to the same codec resolution and bitrate as the mpeg cam that's this and now let's take the video from the mpeg cam shot in roughly the same place and time and put it here now once again the mpeg cam has the bit rate advantage it's shooting at about 1600 kilobits while my video is locked to 1500 and yet the mpeg cam is nearly unintelligible well my footage looks almost like a low quality dvd or a really good vhs rip virtually all the characteristics of both these files are identical except that one of them had all the power of a 2020s computer put into encoding it while the other one got whatever hitachi could squeeze into the mpeg cam you see this camera doesn't have a cpu in it doing the encoding it has a dedicated custom chip an actual hunk of silicon that hitachi designed themselves they were apparently pretty proud of it and i can't blame them they made this in 1996 and designing a complete mpeg encoder decoder chip at that time was pretty tough however it seems to me that they just didn't put enough oomph in it the best explanation for this camera's problems is that it simply doesn't have enough computational power to crunch the numbers fast enough to produce a reasonable quality output it may produce 1600 kilobits of data but it's using very simple math to do it i can actually demonstrate this phenomenon if i take the same video i showed you the 352 by 240 version of my cell phone video and then i tell the encoder ffmpeg in this case to use only half as much computational power all of a sudden it looks a lot worse like noticeably worse if i ask the encoder to use as little power as possible quality level 31 the worst the ffmpeg can do we get this this is garbage it's unwatchable and it's still better than the mpeg cam which is astonishing the mpeg cam produces the worst footage i have ever seen in any format except for that time that someone sent me a copy of the entire b-movie compressed to eight megabytes the cause of the problem seems straightforward to me but the question is how did hitachi look at this and go oh yeah this should go to market how do they not see that this was unusable and pull the plug well i have absolutely no idea i couldn't begin to tell you there's no information however for some utterly baseless speculation that's definitely wrong but leads to a convenient segue maybe this device originally used a different codec when they were developing it one that was more efficient used the processing power and storage they had more effectively and then they had to pivot to mpeg-1 when their marketing department decided to switch this device from just being a general purpose camcorder to taking on the fastest growing phenomenon in telecommunications history see once you're done shooting video on this thing you've got to play it back somehow now you could just get the av cable and plug it into a television let's take a moment and see what that looks like okay so it's a tiny bit more watchable but not much even on a little crt like this the compression artifacts are still grossly visible and anyway hitachi wasn't really targeting that market they didn't just want to make a camcorder that happened to be digital they wanted to make one that was ready to take on the internet in 1997 mpeg-1 was probably the most widely supported codec in the world and people were getting internet connections at a breathtaking pace hitachi saw the coming revolution of internet video thinking it was going to happen any moment when in fact it took another decade plus but they thought this camera could be at the forefront of it their marketing for this actually suggests that you shoot video on this camera and just shove it straight onto a website unedited now nobody was going to do that edited or unedited given the quality of this camera's footage but let's see what that process might have looked like since the storage medium is pc card you might think you can just pop it in the side of a laptop and you'd be right any laptop with a two slot card bay can accept this drive and on most os's it should just pop up and work right away showing up as a normal mass storage device like a usb drive you can simply copy the files right off the card and watch them of course if you didn't have a laptop this wouldn't work you could buy pc card adapters for desktop pcs but they were often fairly inconvenient and if you had for instance an ultralight laptop with one slot or no slots you were out of luck completely hitachi did provide solutions however two adapter kits were available for the mpeg cam both of which plug into the big multi-pin socket on the side one of them adapted to the parallel port which virtually every computer had at this time and the other was a proprietary isocard which they simply call the isa interface which provides some kind of unknown connection over a six pin din plug the iso card is odd it's clearly missing a lot of components that could have been on there among those av in and out jacks as labeled on the board now the multi-pin connector on the camera has so many pins that i strongly suspect they intended to have av in on the camera from the get-go and that this board would act as a sort of port replicator when it was plugged in but there aren't enough pins on the din cable to support those signals so i don't know if this was meant to be some sort of standalone video input output card for the pc or what at any rate either attachment method allows you to get your videos off of the camera without taking the drive out like i said earlier you can just leave it in there indefinitely and when it fills up you plug it into the computer copy your files off wipe it remotely and then keep going one bummer however is that when connected using either method the camera does not show up in my computer in order to access the drive you have to use hitachi's software the software is unsurprisingly not very good i don't think hitachi developed it themselves i think they've got some random studio to just slap together the bare minimum viable product so it's pretty rough basic file transfer is accomplished with pure vi which is little more than a basic file browser that happens to have been extended to recognize the camera driver by the way i kept having trouble getting it to recognize the camera turns out that's because i was putting it in play mode which is what anybody would think you should do but if you notice the pc mode is actually the record mode that's bizarre but okay the ui is not stellar if you want to copy files off the camera you can't just drag them out of the window and drop them in an explorer window you have to navigate through the tree view find the folder on your local drive you want to put them in and then go back to the camera to drag them out this is a nitpick however most people would not really have cared about that now you'll notice that there's five folders here these are actually created automatically by the camera because it supports a feature i'm not sure i've ever seen before from play mode you can press media navigation to see the list of files on the card this is actually a pretty crisp and intuitive interface displays a list of folders and a convenient summary of what quantity and type of files are in each one along those same lines there's a menu option to see how much space is remaining on the hard drive and it displays that in terms of each media type that you can record in at once as well as the raw number of megabytes remaining so it's a very well thought out ui descending into a folder you can view thumbnails and metadata and select files to play but you can also pull up a menu and select change folder to move a clip between folders this allows you to categorize your media in the field although as far as i can tell there's no option to do this in bulk or to record by default into a particular folder so you're going to have to move every clip every time you create one but it does mean that you can put all of your vacation whale watching videos into the whale watching folder you can also reorder clips in a folder since this camera can be used in an auto play mode you can manually move these around to create a playlist one per folder hitachi actually had some interesting ideas about how that could be used which we'll touch on later another very curious feature here is the ability to modify the date and time that a clip was recorded never seen that before i feel like it's only possible use would be fraud going back to the software purevi doesn't do much else it can remotely update the time on the camera or format the card and it can command the camera to start playing a video on the lcd but that's about it it's very bare bones no remote capture or anything like that next up while hitachi did suggest that you could simply upload your mpegs directly to websites i think almost everyone would have wanted to do some amount of processing first so editing software was a must now at this time adobe premiere and a few other non-linear editors were available and fairly mature but they also cost a fortune and required a beast of a machine so what we get here is uh less than that the first tool is called easy cut and if you used virtual dub it's like an extremely cut down version you can scrub around a video pick a beginning and end of a single clip and write out that one clip to a new file that's it zero options but it does get you the absolute bare minimum next is the very awkwardly named media chef clipping this is in fact a non-linear video editor but perhaps the most awkward one i've ever used first you load up a video in this window here there's no scrub bar you can't navigate around all you can do is hit play which simply previews the video without letting you interact with it at all or you can press start that begins to slowly play through the video not sure why it moves at 10 fps but it does as it plays you can see the video appearing in the window at the bottom that's the timeline and the video image represents the current selected clip if i hit cut it'll place an edit at that point in the video make a new clip and keep rolling from that moment and i can continue doing this until the video is fully divided into segments the next step would be to hit stop then start going through finding the clips i don't want and deleting them this is in itself not that different from a modern nle process just very awkward normally you would do these same actions by scrubbing through the video placing edit marks here and there and deleting the parts you don't want just like we're doing here but this program for some reason forces you to do it in this weird gonzo sprint where you can't pause can't rewind to catch a missed mark you just have to run through the whole video smashing the cut button on the fly as fast as you can it's weird but maybe it's explained by limited processing power or something i don't know to clean up the edits you can then right click on each clip and go to trim which shows you a sort of rudimentary timeline with each frame broken out so you can find exactly where you want to start and stop and adjust each trim point this is actually not a terrible way to do it and i kind of wish it just worked like this from the get-go in fact you can sort of edit like this by just dropping the whole clip into the timeline directly then going to the split interface which allows you to pick a point to split the video into two clips you can then repeat this process to find each desired cut point then delete the in-between clips but since you can't actually play the video in full motion this way it's really hard to find the right spots at first i thought this could only do one file but no you can actually drop in other clips and assemble a video out of several different pieces of media it only does mpegs no still images no avis but this does at least give you the bare minimum functionality of a pair of video editing decks you can take two sets of footage recorded separately and assemble them into a basic composition like this welcome to the forest i'm vlogging from the forest [Music] one of the other included programs is media chef print which is actually kind of weird i've never seen anything quite like it its purpose is to convert a video into what photographers call a contact sheet basically it offers options to split the frames of a video into a series of stills and print them on paper in a grid you can auto generate the sheet by picking a frame every few seconds automatically picking frames by hand or a few other methods each frame can be given a custom caption or just labeled with its time index and you can also select a border i'm not super sure what this program was intended for but basically in an era when digital video playback was still not super convenient it makes sense people would want to put a video onto paper somehow the one remaining interesting program is authoring master which is sort of like a terrible hypercard clone the program launches with an empty canvas which you can then populate with a background image and any number of buttons the buttons can either pop up an image play a video or sound clip or jump to another authoring file with this you could conceivably produce a sort of interactive presentation by connecting one sheet to another and providing buttons to link back to the prior ones at each step but it would be majorly tedious the options are also remarkably limiting you can't even put custom text on the canvas my favorite feature is the kids mode versus business mode options which simply change the borders from colorful ones to fake chrome ones the other programs are nothing to write home about there's a photoshop knockoff for editing stills that just has the usual basics that every cheap photo editor had at the time cropping drawing rotating and simple image effects there's also a standalone software-based mpeg player for people who have no mpeg decoding built into their os and that's about it so the software is rudimentary to be kind but that's really in keeping with the rest of the camera which is only technically a camera and i think one of the reasons for that is it was probably a prototype you see a year later in 98 hitachi released the m2 which several magazines reported on as if it were exactly identical to the mpeg-1 the specs seem to be the same the chassis looks exactly the same so what's the difference here well i found this fact on mpegcam.net which explains the differences and they're pretty substantial a scuzzy interface a mic input av in the ability to pause and fast forward the ability to split videos in the camera and yes a macro focus mode which i think probably just means the lens you know actually focuses at all and let's not miss this improved video quality this is a prototype that's the thing that was supposed to come out in 97 but they couldn't finish it in time and some executive walked in and said well it's going to be out but christmas so they buttoned up what they had dumped on the market unfinished then a year later when they'd actually completed the project they put out the real one and of course by then the damage was done anyone who was aware of this thing was not going to buy the second one by the way one other interesting feature in this list they said that they would include a powerpoint converter that would convert a powerpoint presentation into an mpeg you could play on the device and the use cases for this are obvious the idea of using this as a portable source for a slideshow at a business presentation is really cool now i don't see why you couldn't just put a bunch of jpegs in a folder instead and hit play that seems like it would be higher quality unless you were going to put moving pictures in the presentation i guess in 98 people were still obsessed with the powerpoint presentations where the word art flies around and whatnot so maybe that's what they intended it is a neat idea though but given the price of this thing which was somewhere between 600 and 2500 depending on which website you check i don't think any number of neat tricks would have saved it unless they improved the encoding quality it needed to actually be a good camcorder for anyone to want to buy it but i doubt they achieved that even in the m2 because the mpeg cam series died there and didn't go any further or maybe it did depending on your perspective by 2001 hitachi had updated mpegcam.net to state that the m2 was no longer available and that the dvd cam was the next generation this makes a lot of sense dvd camcorders record mpeg albeit mpeg2 and they record it onto disks rather than hard drives or flash drives but they basically achieve what hitachi intended you could shoot digital video and then immediately pop it into a computer and start editing it without having to wait to scrub through an entire video tape now i did a whole video on this topic where i explained that these did have their own faults but they were much closer to the ideal that hitachi imagined when they created this device so the mpeg camcorder in the fullness of time was vindicated as a product but 97 was just too early if you enjoyed this please consider subscribing so i know that you like this sort of thing remember turn on notifications because i upload kind of regularly if you really enjoyed this consider supporting me on patreon all these people here are making it possible for me to get stuff like this to show to you and it would be very hard for me to do without their support i'm so grateful to all of them and to everybody else for watching this video thank you

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]

Views: 90,558

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics

Id: lQucivv6LIs

Length: 34min 24sec (2064 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021