The first thing that ever used MPEG4 [Sharp VN-EZ1]

so you clicked on this video because i put this little dinky camera in the thumbnail and i told you what it was in the title this is the sharp vnez1 and despite looking totally generic and unremarkable it is exactly what i probably suggested it is a hypothetically important step in the history of cameras and video codecs and if you want to just see this right away there'll be a chapter you can skip to below but i made this video about two different things because i think that before you hear this story we should really tie up the loose ends on another because this camera is in a sense a follow-up to this one this showed up on my channel about nine months ago it's a strange little digital solid-state camcorder released by hitachi in 1997 way ahead of its time it records on a tiny little hard drive no it's not in there here we go this is a 260 megabyte spinning disk in a pcmcia form factor and this thing records mpeg onto it it's a really small device for what it is in 1997 and it had some interesting features especially some editing capabilities that were neat at the time and nobody cared about it i think this was hitachi's first video camera and it was well built and largely well designed but it didn't put them on the map as a respected name in that market probably because the performance was horrifying in bright light in dim light in complex scenes and simple ones almost every frame that i shot with this thing was muddy and indistinct i just couldn't get a good picture out of it there aren't any image or focus adjustments on here but i don't think it would make any difference a cinema lens and full manual control probably wouldn't have fixed this because in my opinion the problems don't lie in the optics or the sensor this camera used a single chip mpeg encoder which hitachi invented and they were very proud of it for good reason it was a remarkable accomplishment for the time but in my judgment the mpeg encoding is the biggest problem with this camera i think footage from a red would look like crap if you put it through this thing and that always rubbed me the wrong way hitachi was a respectable company and they had expertise in this sort of thing why would they have gone into full production on a chip that could only output sludge it doesn't make any sense so i spent some time after that video thinking about how this happened my first thought was that maybe my particular unit rotted over the years maybe it used to look better maybe it has bad capacitors or something and i can't find any contemporary reviews with example shots to compare to in fact i can't really find any reviews at all the few magazines that mentioned it were pretty superficial they just uh you know read out the ad copy and moved on and i can't find any independent online reviews period that's probably because this camera cost 2500 and was only really available to magazines that got review copies and that gives them a pretty good reason to be a little generous with their opinions so it's not surprising to me that the reviews i did find were pretty vague except for one that spent a whole page praising the camera and then said that it's video and still image quality make it suitable only for web or multimedia work which seems pretty damning there are a few used netposts about it and the ones from people who actually used one seem universally negative one guy even says the video always looks out of focus which tracks with my experience so as far as i can tell yes this was always a bad product when we're examining the strange things that happened in the consumer market in the 90s and 2000s i think we always find ourselves back at the big question why release a product that sucks when manufacturers realize that their product doesn't work or it works poorly why do they put it out anyway instead of waiting until they have something that's definitely good well there's plenty of reasons but here's a story you'll have heard plenty of times the engineers needed a little more time to get it right but christmas was coming up and the executive said ship whatever you have right now this decision always results in the company being ridiculed and the product failing and the fact that executives consistently make this humiliating mistake just tells you everything you need to know about the kind of people in charge of most corporations but anyway because this is so common i simply assumed at the end of my previous video that the mpeg-1 is not actually a finished product and i'm now pretty much certain that's true and i have the evidence right here because this is not the eg1 it's the follow-up model the eg-10 you'll notice that they look completely identical we'll talk about that but first a correction regarding my methodology in the previous video the way i handled the files from this camera was a little naive and it matters here i converted them from mpeg-1 which it natively records to h.264 so i could use them in my video editor but i left them at the same resolution it turns out that due to some apparent differences in how 264 works at lower resolutions this resulted in some interpolation that really smoothed over the video and misrepresented how jarringly rough it was if i scale the video up before re-encoding it it preserves the unpleasantness so this is one clip you might have seen in my previous video and it's pretty bad looks pretty crummy but this is how it looked to me when i wrote the script this one's been properly rescaled and if the compression hasn't done a number on it you'll see that the image looks like a grid of wobbling squares it's really hard on the eyes and this is probably how it looked in 1997 so the clips in this video will look properly bad and with that resolved we can now make a fair comparison between these two devices externally they look basically identical so much so there's no point even going over the chassis the previous video covers everything there's no significant changes so let's jump straight in to the side by side okay so here i am vlogging on both of these simultaneously and i don't think i really need to point out anything in particular the differences are night and day one of these looks like typical heavily compressed low res video but the other looks like it's half the resolution and out of focus to boot now to be clear testing a video codec against a background with a lot of foliage is uncharitable a few people had to set me straight on that scenes full of plants are really difficult to compress so as a test this is highly adversarial and i hadn't known that so i was pretty mean on the eg1 in my previous video in fact the eg10 also struggles in this kind of scene here you can see it's definitely feeling the burn but it's still a major improvement on the newer camera you can easily recognize trees bramble and bushes even if you can't make out the subspecies the older camera on the other hand just produces a vague impression of plants and it has these unpleasant wobbly artifacts so progress has been made for sure if we head out to the airport where there's much less greenery even the eg-1s picture is a lot clearer than before this scene is just easier to compress the eg-10 still does better though the background is just generally clearer and more detailed the plants that are there are much less of a soupy mess and you can even almost make out the livery on the planes which is impressive for 352 by 240 video and on that subject i should mention that the newer camera shoots at the exact same resolution as the old one the same codec and the same bit rate all the specs are identical it's just better so how's that possible well video codecs can have varying quality even for the same bit rate depending on how much processing power was put into the encoding stage and here it seems clear that hitachi has managed to put more oomph behind their mpeg now for what it's worth i'm pretty sure that the encoding isn't the only problem i don't know whether the optics or the digitizer were subpar in the first camera but i think one or both of them have been tweaked in some way because even in still images there's a clear improvement those are stored as jpegs so they shouldn't involve the mpeg encoder at all i'm guessing they're just software encoded so i think that purely as a camera the eg10 is a better product now moving on from the video quality there are some new features as well the playback mode for instance now lets you split video clips right here on the device which is a feature i first saw on sony's minidisc camcorder which i covered in a video before it also finally lets you fast forward and rewind while playing back clips which was weirdly absent before almost like they hadn't quite finished the firmware but we'll come back to that the recording options have also been expanded the eg1 only shot at a single bit rate 1.6 megabits as you can see here the eg-10 however has two modes there's fine mode which is still 1.6 megabits but as you're seeing now it looks considerably nicer there's also standard mode shown here which records at 1.1 megabits and offers longer run time but in my opinion it still looks better than the eg1 this camera now also officially supports flash cards which is my favorite addition you can actually put a cf card in a pcmcia adapter or in this case you can put a micro sd card into an sd adapter and put that into a compact flash adapter then that into a pc card adapter and it'll write files to that happily which made this video so much easier to make than the previous one here i'm using an 8 gig card and i don't think it's addressing the whole thing but i can still get several hours of video on it which is a mild improvement over the 20 minutes of the original 260 meg hard drive another new feature is the external mic jack which is a curious thing because the built-in mic is actually pretty good check this out you would think the external mic input would be really useful for outdoor shots because you could cut down on wind noise for instance but you know it's actually a little windy out here and the internal mic is doing just fine it's surprisingly decent and there's a problem with the external input i'm on this little uh sony lav mic i found in a drawer now and uh maybe you'll hear it maybe you won't but in my tests i started clipping immediately because there's no volume adjustment on the mic input and there's no display on the screen so you can't turn it down and if you're clipping you won't know that sucks honestly the only reason i'd want this is if i needed to hand someone a mic to actually put right up to their mouth the last new feature is macro focus which is on this button here now that was sorely missing in the original device as bad as the image already was on the eg1 it's even worse at close range the minimum focal distance on this thing that is the closest thing that'll be in focus is something outrageous it's like three or four feet here for instance these berries are maybe a foot or two away and they're already a mess any closer and they just turn into a blur the eg-10 however can get super close in macro mode which really makes the most of its minuscule pixel count besides that the normal minimum focal distance is now much closer than before so you don't even need that macro feature unless you're really on top of something so in short the eg-10 just fixes everything that was wrong with the eg1 the compression is still pretty harsh but that was unavoidable given the limitations of the era and every other major issue is resolved this camera is now perfectly adequate for casual and professional video hitachi really outdid themselves unfortunately it took them two years and in two years a lot of things changed in 1999 dedicated solid state camcorders weren't yet an established market but digital cameras with video modes were very much a thing and with formats like compactflash having largely displaced pcmcia no camera needed to be this big anymore hitachi would have needed to go back to the drawing board to make this make sense in 1999 and since they didn't this product just kind of missed the boat but i'm not convinced that it had to there's physical evidence inside these devices that suggests that the eg-10 was actually the product they intended to deliver in the first place see i found myself wondering after i made the first video if my eg1 lens had fallen out of calibration over the years then that's why it looked so bad so i disassembled it i figured out how to adjust the lens from a service manual and i dialed in the back focus which didn't improve the picture any but it gave me the chance to look inside i was kind of surprised when i compared it to this one the circuitry itself appears to be virtually identical between the two devices none of these part numbers resolve to anything which makes sense since they're mostly in-house hitachi components i'm not sure which one might be the mpeg encoder if that's even on this board but i will point out that the sh3 here is the predecessor to the cpu that was in the dreamcast so that's neat the part numbers have all changed slightly between the two so maybe hitachi iterated on the silicon but clearly there's been no deep reimagining of the design the lens assembly is clearly identical as well with the only difference being that a component of the zoom mechanism is now clear instead of black for some reason the elements don't look any different the board on the back of the lens that connects to the ccd is also identical so i very much doubt they changed sensors overall these look like the same camera so far but there's an even bigger smoking gun here take a look at the spot inside the camera head where the mic jack mounts on the eg-10 and now take a look at the same spot on the eg-1 you can see the pads where the jack would have gone they planned to have the mic input in the original design but they clearly had to pull it before release given that the lens assembly is unchanged i also suspect that the macro functionality was there from the get-go as well the way that macro works on camcorder lenses for some reason always involves turning the zoom ring all the way to the minimum position and then forcing it a little bit further into macro mode and it works the same way here this tiny gear rotates when you zoom in and out but when you enable macro you can see it turns a little bit past the minimum position since these mechanisms are clearly identical in every other way i can't imagine that the original lens couldn't do this as well more likely it's there they just didn't enable it in the firmware maybe because they hadn't finished testing the feature likewise i think that support for flash memory was probably there from the beginning in fact from the point of view of the device a flash card should just look like any other hard drive and indeed the eg1 would recognize a cf card and it would record photos to it so there was no problem interfacing with it it just refused to record video which is definitely a deliberate decision i assume that the engineers didn't have time to test flash cards from different manufacturers for compatibility so they hard-coded the firmware to only work with a hard drive of a known model this one here that way at least they wouldn't get a bunch of returns from people using incompatible media and look i know this is a lot of speculation but i think it's obvious that hitachi was aiming to make this better than it was they wanted to make the eg10 in the first place this is not what they wanted to sell i think that goes without saying and my gut says that these features probably worked but they were ripped out at the last second even though they only needed a little more testing and tweaking and on those grounds i bet the same is true for the mpeg encoder itself i don't think hitachi's engineers spent however many long months developing the first mpeg chip in the world only to produce one that made video this bad i just don't think it's likely that they would have taken it all the way to mass production in that state if there were fundamental problems they would have been discovered at much earlier phases of development so i doubt that that's what happened i think that this is the same device the same sensor the same electronics and the only real difference was that the engineers were finally given the time to finish the firmware tweak it and optimize the encoding settings i doubt it took them another year and a half to do that they probably just needed a couple months but we're told they couldn't have that and then when some change in personnel came some tyrant got replaced they were finally allowed to finish the device properly only to release it far too late in a market that couldn't care less that is as usual for my channel a fairy tale i made it all up i have no evidence other than some junk dna i found that could be interpreted a lot of ways but we've seen enough we have watched stories like this play out so many times over so many decades that occam's razor suggests i have it right if i do then this is the story of a tragedy and the other topic of this video which we'll now address rubs salt in the wound not only did hitachi fail to release their camera in time for it to be as impressive as it deserved to be they were nearly beaten to market on the re-release by another company who released their own ahead of its time product but one using the next generation of technology and one that had far more excuses for the way it was so let's re-meet the subject of this video this is the sharp vn easy one h it's still kind of a piece of crap but probably for better reasons per the website for this camera which is still up 22 years later if you can believe that sharp released this in probably june or august 1999 so probably a few months after the eg10 and just like hitachi who were so proud of their encoder that they stamped mpeg right on the box sharp did the same except this time the brag isn't about mpeg but mpeg-4 and for any of this to make sense we have to talk about mpeg4 it's meaningless to tell you about this camera unless you understand what it meant at the time because most people nowadays only know the modern definition and it's changed so hello welcome to the mpeg zone get ready these days virtually anyone who works with video handles mp4 files on the regular and as many people will correctly tell you that extension says nothing about the contents of a file except that it uses the mpeg-4 container format which is just a way to organize video and audio streams in a file the actual algorithms used to compress those streams can be anything nowadays video probably most often uses the h.264 and 265 codecs which are extremely efficient and supported by everything under the sun but there are plenty of other options likewise audio could be an uncompressed pcm waveform mp3 aac or just about anything else fortunately operating systems now contain tons of codecs out of the box so very little of this is ever visible to the user and while those same codecs can be packaged in other containers like mob or mkv those also have broad support so in short the fact that a file is mpeg4 means virtually nothing but it wasn't always that way let's take a look back at the original mpeg-1 it was maybe best known as a video codec but it was also its own container format and it described several audio codecs called mpeg-1 layer 1 and layer 2 as well as layer 3 which is yes the same codec used in the ubiquitous mp3 file although that is actually a distinct format that the original developers broke off on its own sort of a weird story there in other words mpeg-1 is the complete package a container plus video and audio codecs all wrapped up in one standard it had to be because nobody had really invented video files for pcs before then so they had to do it all end to end its successor mpeg-2 was also a complete package as mpeg-3 would have been if it had been finished and so was mpeg-4 when it was first introduced in late 1998 it offered a container format called mpeg4 part 1 and a set of video and audio codecs called either mpeg4 visual and audio or mpeg4 part 2 and part 3. now i don't know if this is as funny to you as it is to me but mpeg-4 part 2 was also standardized by the itu as h263 yeah it's just the one that comes before the one we have now in fact mpeg-2 was h.262 and when 264 came out the mpeg group retroactively integrated it as part 10 which means that mpeg4 not only is the name of a video codec but two of them so if anyone ever says that mpeg4 is just a container they're wrong but you should probably be more specific adding 264 did make things a little confusing but it sort of makes sense because they were basically just updating the spec instead of jumping ahead to mpeg-5 which in fact does now exist but while you'd think it would contain the next codec in the series h.265 that's actually part two of mpeg-h are you keeping up now those numbers are just formal designations the codecs also have proper names which nobody uses for some reason h.265 is hevc 264 is avc and the part of 263 that was usually implemented was called asp but for some reason we all started using these numbers i don't know why we started doing that but i certainly don't remember anybody ever saying h.263 back in the day what i did hear people say was mpeg4 meaning the codec itself but far more often people talked about divx as a reminder the mpeg standards don't provide a way to make actual files no software they're just specifications it's up to third parties to implement them as actual programs and the first implementations are always commercial products with their own names and price tags attached divx was one company's implementation of mpeg4 part 2 and as far as i can tell it was in fact named after circuit city's drm encumbered movie format first as a joke and later as a way to leverage brand recognition i'm not sure how many companies ever used divx since it never really did become all that common on consumer pcs but in 2001 if you were grabbing videos of someone's linux setup from their website or pirating the matrix you were very likely using it of course it wasn't free so you were often also pirating divx itself but eventually it was more or less open sourced under the name xvid and for much of the 2000s it became a mainstay on any nerd's pc for people who weren't nerds the more common way to encounter h.263 was in the original windows media video format technically known as wmv7 which was also an adaptation of h.263 asp although it wasn't quite compatible with it of course in fact i believe that was microsoft's second proprietary extension of mpeg4 the first of which was illicitly used as the basis for the original divx codec which was called version 3 even though it was the first version now wmv7 was extremely common on commercial websites for several years usually packaged in microsoft's own container format asf which was actually the underlying format of wmv and wma meaning that instead of calling it a wmv file you could have said wmv asp inside asf if you were irritating so i'm sure you followed all of that but trust me it was relevant in short mpeg-4 or at least the underlying h.263 was everywhere since 264 came out only a few years into the 2000s and was objectively better it's not surprising that mpeg4 visual aka part 2 aka asp aka h.263 is now long forgotten but in 99 it was a hot product that was coming so hot off the presses that i don't even know how many people had heard of it yet putting it on the box was a major flex but now let's look at the product the vnez1 was first sold in mid 99 and sharp claimed on their website which is still up 22 years later if you can believe that that this was the first mpeg4 camera in the world given that the standard had been ratified less than a year prior that's not hard to believe the question is was it the first good one now since i consider this the next step in the story of portable mpeg cameras i'm going to be comparing it to the hitachi's and let's start with the chassis the sharp is nowhere near as well built while the hitachis were rock-solid and fairly ergonomic hunks of sheet metal this is a hollow plastic featherweight that looks far less distinct or beautiful most of its weight comes from the batteries on the other hand it was also around seven hundred dollars while the original eg1 was around 2500 so this isn't surprising and to be fair it's far more pocketable and less likely to break if you drop it the basic shape and layout does look a lot more conventional than the hitachi's but remember that by 1999 digital cameras were becoming a lot less exotic and they were all starting to take on the enduring standard designs that we'd see for decades on the front here we've got the usual hand grip and the shutter button arrangement and the sensor assembly is mounted up here and it rotates up and down in a little pod which seems strange but rotating sensors were actually not uncommon for digital cameras at the time nikon's coolpix did it and sharp had a whole series of camcorders like this that they called vue cams in fact they call this one the internet view cam for reasons that will become obvious this camera has a very tiny manual focus control around the lens the smallest one i've ever seen and the pod can rotate 180 degrees backwards into what we would now call selfie mode you can also flip it all the way over into the body to protect the lens on top of the lens there's this slider which sharp calls an iris switch but that's actually a weird falsehood it just moves a dark piece of glass what photographers would call a neutral density filter in front of the sensor to cut down the overall brightness of the image on the side there's a speaker and a dc input jack and then we've got the back as you can see this is not a pro grade device by any measure it's pretty bare bones we have a smallish lcd we've got a power switch we have a movie still selector a menu button and a d-pad that's it we'll take a peek at the ui in a minute on the bottom there's a single flip out door which exposes four double-a batteries which was pretty much standard for consumer digital cameras at this point and then of course the flash storage which is on smart media now if you're younger than 30 you might not have ever seen a smart media card they were big in the late 90s but they fell out of popularity pretty quickly and i've never liked them they're too thin and fragile they're too easy to insert upside down they're supposed to be keyed but they never are and it's pretty tough to find one in sizes larger than a few megs this is 32 megs it's the first one of that size i've ever seen of course flash memory was just small and expensive at the time in cameras it had largely displaced the tiny hard drives of the previous generation with lower weight volume power consumption and fragility but pro models were already pretty much all switched over to compact flash which was better in every way except for being a little bigger and maybe a little more expensive but anyway that's all there is on the outside so let's take a look at the interface slide the switch here and we get the typical display you've got a live viewfinder with the osd that gives us the recording mode time left white balance the usual stuff it is weird that the time indicators in the corner that tell you how much recording time has been used and how much is left are called lap and rem like this is a stop watch or something the menu doesn't offer anything particularly spicy it's just the usual quality settings backlight compensation white balance that sort of thing like i said this is really bare bones all it really does is record so it's time we take a look at the video features and it's not a great look the quality settings start at lp for long play and that shoots at the stunning resolution of 160 by 120 at a bit rate of about 32 kilobits and 2 frames per second obviously that's barely video at all and while it is the extreme economy mode it doesn't get all that much better from there there are normal and fine modes which marginally bump up the bit rate and frame rate and then there's two different high quality settings the first one is called s fine which still shoots at 160 by 120 but at 15 fps and the other is one quarter vga which shoots at 320 by 240 but only 5 fps if that name seems odd by the way remember that vga is 640x480 so when you have both dimensions you're dividing it twice you get one quarter the total pixel count the two top modes use the same amount of bandwidth 384 kilobits one just divides it into a higher resolution with lower frame rate and the other does the reverse now none of these modes sound appealing at all but with our fingers crossed let's take a look at the s fine mode of the first mpeg-4 camera hey grandma how's it going uh just wanted to let you know how things are here in seattle um having a great time there's like so much to look at so why am i vlogging to my grandma even though she's no longer with us for vera similitude because that's partly how sharp sold this camera so it's a good place to watch it struggle on their website which is actually still online after 20 years if you can believe that they have sample clips demoing some proposed use cases and half of them are vacation videos specifically you're meant to take videos while away from home then email them back to family either from the place you're staying or from an internet cafe and that's what makes this the internet view cam consider that in 1999 if your email provider was generous they probably limited attachment sizes to about a megabyte a normal mpeg would exceed that rapidly but mpeg4 was a huge improvement in efficiency and there weren't any file sharing sites yet so email was pretty much what you had sharp primarily sold this as an appliance for producing email ready video clips and sure enough you can fit a staggering 30 seconds of high quality video from this camera into a one megabyte file unfortunately you've already seen what high quality means here an mpeg of the same bit rate would have looked worse for sure but this is still pretty gnarly in my attempt to show grandma my trip to seattle sure you can make me out okay and the buildings look reasonable enough as a backdrop but as soon as we try to do what people do with camcorders wave it around the environment to point out things we've seen landmarks and whatnot things go wrong fast you can hardly make out the general architecture or even the huge albeit faded letters on the buildings the resolution is pretty wretched the encoding is brutal and the color rendition isn't great either it's bad enough with the brick buildings which are maybe 50 feet away but when we try to look at the glass towers a little further out they're barely identifiable as such you know here in the editing bay watching myself say these lines over and over i feel like i was a bit harsh on the sharp here it's crappy don't get me wrong but even near the end of this video you'll see me saying that it's really not that bad for its intended purpose and this particular clip really looks pretty decent let's be honest if you didn't maximize it you know because it's 1998 and you're a normal person instead of a huge nerd like i am you'd probably be just fine with the quality i just often forget to put myself in those shoes other clips don't do as well for sure but i understood this one and i just didn't want you to be confused like what the hell is he talking about anyway now back to animaniacs here on the wb even the sample footage from sharp's website which is still up after 20 years if you can believe that honestly doesn't sell it all that well in an unrealistically well lit and posed outdoor scene shooting from just a couple feet away you don't really get much more than an impression of what and who you're looking at if this camera had an optical zoom feature like the hitachi's did that would go a long way towards fixing this problem since you could use the same number of pixels and bits to cover much finer detail but it doesn't have that it does have digital zoom and since the still photo mode can do 640x480 i assume the sensor has at least that much resolution so while digital zoom often reduces quality here it might actually improve it by taking a smaller slice out of a higher resolution image and technically yes it does do that but only marginally the details are clearer but only just the same scene looks a lot better in one quarter vga everything is much crisper the overall look is far more pleasant but it still doesn't really let us see any detail at a distance you also lose the ability to zoom completely which is strange because we probably aren't actually at the native resolution of the sensor yet you'd think you'd be able to get at least a 2x zoom but no dice so as a vacation camera it seems useless for anything other than basically talking straight into it in selfie mode anyway let's look at some other scenarios i mentioned before that video codecs get eaten alive by plants so here's my backyard again and in s fine mode the sharp struggles i think at least as much as the hitachi's did planty backdrops definitely get mangled pretty good everything's blurry and muddy and i'd say it's a toss-up whether the sharp actually does better than even the eg1 on the other hand the sharp once again comes out on top in quarter vga mode if you ignore the frame rate i also went back to the airport where we again find the sharp in super fine mode copes better than its bitrate would suggest but still produces a pretty crappy picture the plants here aren't as lethal to the compression but you still can't really make out what they are and delivery on the planes is totally lost in the sludge in quarter vga it again delivers what looks like a series of still photos but they are certainly far more intelligible this gives us the best shot yet of me the plants and even the livery on the plane if you don't mind not really having any illusion of motion also if you're curious what the lower bit rate modes look like here's fine which isn't fine to say the least the individual frames are basically gibberish if you pause it you can't really make out anything but to be fair in motion it's not as bad as you'd expect especially considering that this 14 second clip is only 250 kilobytes the normal and lp modes however are really just beyond usefulness i'm not sure what application these could have most of the time you can't even make out the basic shapes in the scene and in lp the frame rate is so low that you're often just left staring at a face or a body part slowly realizing that it's been blurred beyond recognition it's actually kind of creepy of course even though they're mostly useless the reason they included these low bit rate modes is obvious as i keep doing on this channel i have once again brought you a camera whose maximum recording time is worse than one from 1984. even the earliest consumer camcorders never had a runtime shorter than 30 minutes but this camera in the s fine mode on a 32 meg card can only fit about 10 minutes of video and that was a beefy card for the time this would have cost over a hundred bucks this camera actually shipped with only a four meg card which was limited to a minute 15 in s fine mode and i believe that takes the cake for the shortest recording time of any camera i've ever owned however while that is truly shocking i think it's only fair to point out that the only purpose of this camera is to get short clips that you bring back to a computer and email so if a minute 15 is enough for one or two video letters and you only want to send one or two in a day you can just empty the 4 meg card every day and reuse it i imagine that was the logic that made sense to sharp moving on we can take a look at close-ups where the sharp actually shines the brightest with the focus racked all the way in you can get pretty close pretty satisfying pictures of things in s-fine mode though it doesn't really have the national geographic effect that you might want there's just not quite enough definition but in quarter vga it does all right the colors are crushed and the frame rate makes it really hard to really enjoy it but the pictures are definitely impressive all things considered the eg-10s macro mode while definitely an upgrade over the previous one somehow doesn't hold up as well despite using the same resolution and a lot more bit rate it has more saturation things look more natural and alive and they definitely move more realistically all which counts for something but the sharp picture just has more detail it is however pretty tough to tell from the lcd whether you put the focus in the right place since it never really looks sharp and it's very hard to manipulate the focus without putting your finger in front of the lens which is irritating the saving grace is the sensor is so small that you only really need to touch the focus if you're really close up the rest of the time it's usually fine now the neutral density filter on the other hand i have no idea why that's here even shooting directly into the sun it didn't seem to matter whether i had it open or not the camera just adjusts exposure in either position to produce apparently the same picture which is weird besides the normal recording modes there's one more option in here time lapse i've mentioned before that flash makes certain recording tricks easier and this is one of those the camera can do 10x 40x and 100x recording which is a nice extra feature but since time lapse is usually shot with wide angles which this camera does terribly at it's not all that useful the final feature is the still photo mode it takes 640x480 jpegs it has no flash and it pretty much looks like any contemporary 1999 digital camera so with that we've covered all the image quality aspects and now we should briefly address the audio it's awful or at least i think it is i don't know if the microphone has some sort of bonkers design flaw or the encoding software as a bug in it or something but listen to this sound hey grandma just wanted to get in touch and let you know how things are going here in seattle i'm not speaking very loudly in that clip but it's still trashing my voice it overdrives the slightest provocation and this even happens in the official sample clips everything i see in here is completely new to me for example look at this rock it kind of looks like my father thank you for your custom this is in response to your question at the bottom of the scanner you'll find the fixed lever for the reading head and of course when i saw this i assumed it was because of the modern codecs on my pc struggling to play a 22 year old file but when i tested it on the camera itself i thought i heard the same corruption but when i watched back the footage just now i decided it was really just the tiny speaker on the camera distorting so to test this i put one of the sample clips from sharp on the camera everything i see in here [Music] for example and that's just normal tiny speaker distortion so apparently uh it really is the software the way the g726 codec is interpreted has apparently changed over time or there's a bug in the modern codex so keep this sort of thing in mind when you're messing around with old files because i've been bit by it a couple times anyway now back to cheers by the way this sample from sharp's website which is still up after 20 years if you can believe that is another suggested use case tech support procedures could be recorded and emailed to customers so you'd have to explain everything over the phone it's actually a pretty good idea that largely didn't catch on for a myriad of reasons the camera does of course have a playback mode which you access by turning the lens downward into the body which makes me uncomfortable for some reason it doesn't do anything terribly fancy besides your basic playback you can also play videos in slow motion and you can split a clip right on the camera this is pretty imprecise but it's handy if you just need to trim a file down to email size but all you have is a borrowed pc without any editing software and that is pretty much everything about the camera itself it did of course come with pc software but to call that bare bones is almost an overstatement it's skeletonized is what it is it's more like a pile of loose utilities than an actual software suite there's this media viewer which does almost nothing that windows explorer can't do it just looks at the files and opens them in an external viewer so i don't even know why they included this and a lot of 90s digital cameras seemed to do this they just had this basic file browser that really didn't seem to have any reason to exist but from there you can at least launch the other included utilities first there's the bit rate converter which is just a transcoding utility that lets you convert files down from a higher mode to one of the lower ones of course if somebody had seen any of the other ones they weren't ever going to use this i mean imagine taking one of the already pretty dire clips from this camera and then putting it through another conversion you'd have nothing left at the end there's also the asb to asf converter which serves an absolutely bizarre purpose i mentioned that windows media used the asf container format and that is the format this camera records even though it doesn't use wmv it's kind of weird but if you split a clip in place on the camera the parts become asb files which seem to be proprietary to sharp this just converts those into asf's that can be played normally on a computer so i guess the camera just can't create a complete asf file internally but it does when you record so i don't know what's up there finally there's the asf extractor which is a weird name for what is just a video trimming tool it can clip the beginning or end of a video or take something out of the middle and save it as a new file there's also a tiny app that generates html pages with thumbnails of your videos which crashed when i tried to run it and that's it the software is not terribly helpful but is nonetheless technically present before you could use those tools of course you had to get the files into your computer somehow and that is a far more interesting subject than the software itself see i got my first digital camera which i hated to death in 2001 or so at which point usb was very common and cameras usually acted as their own card readers so i didn't go shopping for a dedicated one until probably 05 at least card readers have been incredibly cheap for a very long time and while nobody's going to be shocked that they used to be pricier i will tell you that i was totally unprepared for the prices i found when i looked this up i expected 40 bucks i was ready for 60 but a lexar card reader from 1999 which used the parallel port cost a hot 90 bucks that's more than some of the damn cards cost so these were expensive but also not always practical some machines laptops at least lacked a parallel port or you were borrowing the machine the owner didn't want you to change the configuration or the machine was stuffed back in a spot where the back couldn't be easily reached so sharp shipped an entirely different solution with this camera that was possibly a little more universal but also super weird this here is a flash path it's made by a company called smartdisk it takes a smart media card right here and if it looks suspiciously like it goes into a floppy drive well i do have to admit that it does and if that gives you a terrible sinking feeling in your stomach about how it works i'm sorry again you're probably right this is a car stereotape adapter except that it puts a flash memory card into your pc's floppy drive and it does it roughly the same way if you're not familiar with those things they're basically a hollow cassette shell with a magnetic tape head that presses against the one in the tape deck in your car and converts the audio from your mp3 player into magnetic fields like what would be sensed from a real tape it's almost like having a tape deck recording into your tape deck as it plays back now this is a little more complicated there's not much solid info out there about how these work but per a twitter thread by phone who seems pretty confident they do in fact contain a little magnetic coil that sits right under your floppy drive's read head and there's a microprocessor that turns the data on your flash card into signals the drive head can read unlike a tape adapter though they can't pretend to be an entire floppy disk that would require just too much sophistication instead they use a software driver that sends simple signals over the head that turn it into something like a serial port the drive performs write operations on like sector zero quote unquote to talk to the processor in the flash path and then it reads that same sector over and over to receive the response data this is deeply arcane but apparently it just worked well enough anyway because they were sold under a half dozen names packed in with all sorts of products they accepted different flash formats and they were even supported by some sony mavicas so you could get more than 1.4 megs of storage for your photos despite their weirdness using one is really straightforward first you have to install the drivers which come in windows 9x and nt versions then you put two cr2016 coin cells into the flash path itself that powers the microprocessor and the flash card since there's no electrical connectivity in a floppy drive then you put the flash card into the slot here and you just put that in your floppy drive and open it in windows explorer just like if it was a big floppy disk it copies at normal floppy disk speed of course which is about twice the maximum throughput of the serial interfaces that were usually in earlier digital cameras that was a big deal when it came out but consider that in 99 usb was in the world and also consider that emptying my 32 meg flash card is going to take about as long over this as copying the entire contents of 22 floppies so you're probably better off with any dedicated card reader but especially a usb one even if you had to get a pci adapter card to add usb to your pc on the other hand this would have worked on just about any computer in existence at the time which is pretty cool that's basically all there is to it though it's super weird in concept but in practice it just does a job and with that intensely strange artifact out of the way you've now seen pretty much everything there is to see about this camera so what conclusions have we reached like i said earlier i feel this camera is part of a lineage the hitachi mpeg cams may not be related in any direct way but they have the same goal to create a portable camera to leverage the quantum leaps in internet video technology that were happening in the late 90s mpeg was as exciting to use on websites in 1997 as mpeg-4 was for email in 1999 and in that regard these were chasing the same dream in much the same way and they cut much the same corners and the parallels continue because the literature for the sharp mentions an mpeg-4 lsi that was shorthand at the time for what we would now call an asec a custom single purpose chip and that means that like the hitachi's this sharp probably uses a dedicated mpeg-4 encoder chip i can't find a sharp patent for it but they must have been working on it for some time before the spec was ratified if they got it out this quickly like hitachi i imagine that sharp was very proud of that chip but unlike hitachi's 1997 effort i suspect that this little guy really is doing the best it can i think that hitachi had a good product that just wasn't properly tweaked on its initial release and this really fixed it up but i'm firmly convinced that the sharp camera was released on time finished tuned up and ready to go it's just that it's impossible to do what it's trying to do well 384 kilobits just is not enough bandwidth for video it's nearly impossible to make 160 by 120 look decent in any case but even at that time resolution the codec is butchering it and at 320 by 240 which is really the minimum viable resolution for a moving picture anyway i don't think there was any way to squeeze out a decent image at a decent frame rate within that bit rate video just doesn't want to be small it is one of the worst space fillers we have and every year we invent a new way to fill up larger hard drives and saturate bigger pipes because video will suffer as much bit rate as you throw at it the footage you're watching right now is leaving my camera at a gigabit per second and that's considered low quality mode i'm shooting this video on the long play setting and i still have to record on two terabyte ssds it's only with extremely sophisticated and very cpu hungry codecs that were able to get this down to a bit rate that your internet connection can handle even consumer dv cameras in the 90s shot at 25 megabits meanwhile this thing was trying to capture usable footage in a third of one megabit and those aren't comparable figures the codex worked completely different ways but the point is this was never gonna fly and indeed while sharp continued releasing devices apparently based on the same technology they didn't get any better for instance in 2001 together with docomo the japanese telecom they put out the eggie a camera with built-in personal handiphone wireless internet which allowed it to live stream video from anywhere essentially a far more practical and pocket-sized successor to the sony vaio i showed a couple videos back one of my patrons who's always up in my business kodakat thank you coda imported one of these recently and we were able to get enough info from it to determine that it's basically the same device as the internet view cam it has the same rotating camera pod it has the same recording modes and it produces basically identical looking footage so while it does have a different touch-based interface and some other additional features besides the internet access i'd eat my hat if it isn't basically the same sensor and the same encoder and if tweaking the encoder chip could make this perform better well sharp had as much time and opportunity as hitachi did two years i think the reason the eggy doesn't look any better is just because video does not want to be less than a megabit to be fair to all of these products sending video over the internet was an incredible novelty in 1999 and while i think the original hitachi camera was unusably bad even for the time and should not have been sold both the eg10 and the sharp really are very impressive accomplishments some enthusiasts probably loved these things both because the alternative was nothing at all really and because these video clips taken as quick 30 second peaks into someone else's life as they were intended achieve their goal you can see basically what's going on in living if desaturated color and you can hear their voice and that would have been special to some people at the time whether the internet view cam was or wasn't historically significant per se beyond a neat toy for enthusiasts it's really just another member in the family of devices and services that wanted to push video over the internet when it was largely still narrowband television had such an immense legacy that tons of companies wanted to usher it forward into the new world of online that just wasn't built for it over and over these companies bashed their heads against the problem and over and over they learned the hard way that 56k is not enough bandwidth and a megabyte isn't enough space to carry television so their products never had wide consumer appeal until broadband became commonplace but they did keep trying their hand at it so i'm sure i'll have another video on another of their failures soon enough and i hope to see you there because for now that's all i have to say except that i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please consider subscribing so now you're into this sort of thing and remember turn on notifications if you want to find out when i upload future videos if you really enjoyed this though consider supporting me on patreon it costs a lot to get all the stuff i show off on here i almost had to spend 90 bucks on this thing because of a very mean e-bear who was trying to take advantage of me and i still had to spend 60 bucks to have it shipped over by a very nice ebayer from the uk but then i still needed the lights and the cameras and the studio to show it to you in and all that costs quite a bit everyone who backs me on patreon like these folks here are doing but especially the folks who are giving me a hundred bucks a month wow all make it possible for me to do better and better work i'm incredibly grateful to all these folks for their support thank you all so much and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude - CRD

Views: 144,812

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: 5g3afPmSnbY

Length: 50min 59sec (3059 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022