Hello! In a previous episode I did a review of the
Fisher Price Pixelvision camera and I immediately got a ton of emails saying “David, you should
also do a review on the Tyco Video Camera,” which was also another type of kids toy camera
and well, here it is! And, I actually bought this several months
ago and I’m just now getting around to actually doing something with it. So, let’s dig right into this thing. So, this is the Tyco videocam. It came out in 1996, almost a decade after
the Fisher Price camera. As you can see it is shaped more like a Handicam
from the 1990s. There is no screen in the viewfinder, it’s
just a straight through lens to help you aim. This slide switch turns it on, and you can
see the LED light up. It has a tripod mount on the bottom.. And it has a lens cap on the front, and you
can see it is a fixed focus lens. It runs on 6 double A batteries, but can also
be powered by an A/C adapter. But where is the record media? Well, it doesn’t have any. The idea behind the camera is that you’d
plug it into your VCR. It just needs a 1/8 inch phone jack to RCA
cable like this. And you would connect one end here to the
camera, and the other end to the line-input in your VCR. Of course, I’ll need to insert a VHS tape
so that I can record a little sample for you. So, I was curious to know the original cost
of this camera, but after searching for hours on google and looking through old catalogs
from Toys R us and Radio Shack and places like that, I just came up empty. One reason I was hoping to find it in a Radio
Shack catalog is due to the manual. If you look at the last page it actually suggests
a replacement for the 20 foot cable using a Radio Shack part number. Looking on some old discussion forums, I did
a few mentions from people saying that they had originally bought the camera for $50 and
another person said they bought it for $100. Either one of those could have been correct,
or both of them could have been correct depending on the time they bought it. So, while looking through those catalogs I
also wanted to see what the cost was of a typical camcorder at the time. This Radio Shack catalog shows several camcorders
costing between $800 and $1,000. So even if this was sold for $100, that was
probably not a bad deal to get your child the ability to record their own videos. I’ll set up the camera on this tripod here
and connect the camera’s line output to the VCR. That way I can record some authentic VHS samples
for you to watch. OK, so this is what the tyco cam looks like
when its hooked up here in my studio. Now, obviously the first thing you’ll notice
is that it’s black and white. And you’ll probably also notice that it’s
a bit blurry. You might want to attribute that to the fact
that this is being recorded to VHS tape and being played back. But, that’s not exactly all of the reason
why. I also wanted to take a moment to let you
hear what it would sound like. This is actually. This section here is coming right from the
microphone on the tyco camera rather than my overhead microphone that I was using just
a minute ago. So, see what you think of that. For this next test, I’ll use this laptop
and a USB video capture device. I’ll unplug the camera from the VCR and
pipe its video directly to the video capture instead. OK, so in this test, I am recording straight
to this laptop computer that I have setting down here rather than to the VCR. And, In a moment, I’m going to take some
still frames from this and we can kind of compare side by side between the VCR and the
direct capture to see what kind of difference there really is. Well, here are the two frames. And looking at them side by side, I can just
barely tell any difference. I think because the image is so soft to begin
with and the fact that there is no color signal, it works really well with VHS tape. I can see a bit of a jagged edge due to the
interlacing on the sides of my face, that is visible on the VHS copy but not on the
direct capture. The camera also comes with this little tripod. It has these little extendable legs. They’re actually kind of hard to get out,
but there we go. You can connect the camera up like this, and
well, that’s how that works. I mean, I guess it was okay for an included
accessory. Since it uses a standard mount, you could
have always bought a real tripod at some place like Wal-Mart or Target that would have been
a lot better. it also comes with this 20 foot bright yellow
extension cable. And, one of the nice things about the tripod
is that it has a little area designed for you to wrap the excess cable around and presumably
you would wrap all of it around this for storage. And once you’ve done that, it all goes into
this little carry bag, which is pretty cool. I wanted to take some footage just around
the house, to see how the lighting and dynamic range are where there is less light than in
my studio, after all that’s what kids would have been expected to deal with back then. Now, what’s interesting about this is that
it almost looks like I’m filming in the dark, but the lights are on in the living
room and to be honest I have pretty bright LED lights. I have better lighting in my office room so
let me show you some of my collectibles… that is except for this irritating tangle
that I got, I suspect this was a common issue. Now that that is fixed, let’s try it again. Even in here it almost looks like I’m filming
with the lights off, despite it being very bright in this room. By the way, this is a Tandy Model 4P somebody
recently donated, and then there’s an Osborne one I recently picked up for $60 that needs
a little restoration work, which you’ll probably see soon. And I also got a bunch of Tandy Color Computer
stuff too. Let’s see what Starlight is up to. She likes looking out the window. Speaking of, the camera really likes that
sun light! So I decided to try some outdoor video. Of course, I’m not going to carry the darned
VCR around with me at the park, so I brought my laptop. I tried taking some footage straight from
the bench here. It’s actually quite bright and for the first
time I feel it has some real dynamic range. But it is still not a very sharp image. And of course the irony here is that I doubt
it was ever intended to be used outdoors considering it required a VCR to be connected at all times. Next I got out the long 20 foot cable so I
could get up and move around a bit. One thing I notice looking at this footage
is that the grass and trees are very bright, which suggests to me that this thing is picking
up a lot of infrared. So, when I got home I decided to try looking
at an infrared remote control. And holy cow! Boy is this camera sensitive to infrared light! It’s so sensitive, I can use this TV remote
as a flash light! In fact, let me try turning the light off
in the room. Wow, look at that. Take a look at this clip where I shine it
straight into the camera. Let’s do a still frame of that. I’ve never seen a pattern like this before
when a CCD has a glare from a bright light source… but the it occurred to me that this
might be a result of the rapid flashing of the LED that is actually sending a binary
signal to the TV. So I tried using just a regular flash light
instead to see what it does. And it appears I was correct about the flashing,
but it also appears this camera cuts out to black when there is a huge over exposure,
which is weird. So, one of the things I now wonder about is
if maybe the reason that some of the scenes look so dark is because this camera prefers
infrared light. And since my entire house pretty much has
LED lighting, I don’t have much infrared light. And, when I think about it, this camera was
made during a time when practically everyone used incandescent lighting. To test this out, I took the camera over to
my parents house. My parents are one of the last few holdouts
still using incandescent bulbs. And it turns out my hunch was correct. This kitchen, for example, actually looks
really bright! What is really telling about this scene is
that to the human eye, this living room is much darker than mine, but to the camera it
appears much brighter. One other thing I wanted to point out is about
the viewfinder. It’s really not very accurate as to what
you are recording. In fact, if you look at this still frame here
of what the camera was recording, I’ll overlay a little box showing what you would see if
you were looking through the viewfinder. So this is what your eyes would see when recording,
but this is what the camera would actually be recording. I also wonder how many people noticed that
the camera has a bad pixel? See, it’s right here. I didn’t want to mention it earlier in the
video because I knew you’d be staring at it the whole time if you noticed it right
away. So what do I think of the Tyco video camera? Well, if it really did sell for $50 back in
1996, then there’s not really a lot I could complain about. Even I find myself wanting to compare this
camera to the Fisher Price Pixel Vision Camera that I reviewed a few months back, but it’s
not really a fair comparison because that camera came out in the 1980s and this came
out almost 10 years later. Yet, at the same time there aren’t a lot
of other toy video cameras to really compare it to. There weren’t very many products like that. So just for a reference, here’s what the
Pixel Camera looked like. Versus what the Tyco camera looked like. So It’s pretty clear the Tyco camera produced
a better picture, and cost quite a bit less too, because it didn’t need to carry around
its own recording mechanism. Also, the microphone on this camera is not
too bad. Had something like this existed when I was
a kid, I would have probably used the heck out of something like this. where if it I had the Fisher Price camera
with all of its problems, I probably would have gotten frustrated with it. And I’d probably have a lot of videos to
show for it today. On the other hand, my parents would have probably
been very irritated because I would have been hauling the VCR all around the house because
I would have had a 20 foot ball and chain with me, so to speak. Anyway, that about wraps it up for this review. I hope you found it interesting, and stick
around until next time!
