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crd.md
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11
12# Before Beta: Sony's 1969 "Camcorder"
13
14## Premise
15
16The device in this bag is an incredibly important, yet also utterly irrelevant
17piece of home video equipment. It occupies a position in history where it should
18have been revolutionary, but wasn't. It has no purpose in the modern world, it
19looks like a joke compared to what came right after it, and almost nobody
20remembers it; for what are probably pretty good reasons. It is one of the most
21useless devices that I own in a lot of senses, but it's also one of the coolest.
22In my history of video documentary I talk about the sort of video tape that
23predated video cassette. If you haven't watched that video then I wish you
24would, I put so much work into it. The short of it is that by the end of the 60s
25there were actually consumer videotape formats. Specifically and most
26significantly, in 1969 the Electronic Industry Association of Japan developed a
27format that was widely accepted around the world for home video taping. It took
28this type of video tape here. It is a half inch videotape, much like what came
29in later video cassettes, except it's not in a video cassette, it's just in an
30open reel. I don't know what this is properly called but people just call it
31EIAJ, and it was widely used around the world by anybody who was into video in
32the 60s and 70s. Sony put out the first EIAJ recorder in 1969 and it probably
33wasn't a revolution. For reasons you're going to see later in this video,
34probably very few people actually bought one. Nonetheless it was the first video
35standard where you could buy a tape, shoot video on it, then take it to a
36friend's house and play it on their machine, even if it was from a different
37manufacturer. Of course your friend had to have a machine (which they didn't)
38but if you were a huge nerd and you knew another huge nerd, then you could do
39this, and you couldn't do that before, so that's pretty cool. The specific model
40that Sony put out in 1969 was the AV-3400; also known as the Porta Pak. I don't
41know how many of these were made or how many sold, but it was enough that they
42show up on eBay pretty frequently. I bought one a couple years ago, which I
43won't be showing to you, because I blew it up in a very silly accident that I
44feel very bad about. Then I bought another one which does work, and I will show
45it to you, and here it is. This is, of course, just the leatherette carrying
46case which is necessary to use the machine as intended, as I'll explain later,
47but let's get a look at the machine itself.
48
49## Physical characteristics
50
51Now originally this had a carrying handle across the front of the case. It was
52good for getting it out of the bag, but mine broke off a long time ago, and the
53other one I have in storage is about most of the way to being broken off, so I
54suggest if you get one of these that you don't ever carry it by the handle. As
55you can see the styling is very 1960s. it has a flip up cover on it, which is
56important, because there are so many exposed parts in here that if you were to
57drop something on this you'd certainly destroy it. I don't think the cover only
58provides that much protection though. it seems pretty thin to me, so you
59probably don't want to drop this anyway. There's two trunk latches over here for
60getting it off. It's actually really inconvenient to do anything with the lid
61on, but you can squeeze these two latches here to pop the hinge pins, take the
62door off. I should mention, by the way, the fit and finish of this machine has
63suffered over the years. The trim pieces were originally glued on, but as you
64can see, the glue failed and they started falling off, and so the whole thing's
65very rattly. Would probably benefit from some TLC that I'm not very good at. So
66here it is in all its complicated glory. There's a lot of parts here, especially
67under this cover, and I'm going to try and explain what pretty much all of them
68do. This machine records analog video on magnetic tape, just like a VCR, but
69different. The biggest difference is that instead of using cassettes, it's an
70open reel mechanism. If you're familiar with quarter inch audio tape, you might
71be familiar with the open reel concept. Instead of having a cassette that
72contains a pair of reels, you have a pair of distinct reels, and you have to
73load the tape into the machine by hand. In case you're not familiar with an
74audio tape recorder let me show you how one of those works very briefly so you
75can see how different this is. On this tape deck you can see up top we have two
76spindles, which are these metal pegs. These hold the two tape reels, which are
77called the supply and take up. When you set up to play or record a tape, you
78take a reel out of the box, put it on the supply side, and thread it through the
79machine. To thread it, you pull the tape off the supply reel, over a tension
80arm, then a roller, then the erase head, record head, play head, cap stand, and
81pinch roller, another tension arm, and finally you wind it around the take-up
82reel. It sounds like a lot of parts, but really what it comes down to is you
83just pull the tape off the supply reel, loop it under the heads, and up onto the
84take up. It's very quick and simple once you're used to it. As you play the
85tape, it slowly winds onto the take-up reel, and when you're done, you can
86either swap them end to end to play the other side, or rewind the tape all the
87way back onto the original supply reel and put it back in its box; and that's
88pretty much all there is to it. This video recorder has a lot of similarities
89but also some really big differences. The first difference is that instead of
90using quarter inch tape, this uses half inch tape, which is simply twice as
91wide. Now, with magnetic tape more width usually means higher bandwidth, and
92that is true here, but not for the same reason it would be in an audio tape
93machine. I'll tell you more about why that is later. When I got this machine it
94only came with the one reel, and it's almost impossible to buy them now on eBay.
95I think people take a look at these and just go, “oh, it's a tape reel”, and
96throw it away, because quarter inch tape reels are thick on the ground and
97worthless. These aren't worth any more but I think people just don't realize
98they're special. Fortunately, my friend Richard was able to make a 3D printed
99one for me, without which I couldn't actually use this thing. If you're ever in
100this situation, I believe you can get this design on Thingiverse. In a quarter
101inch machine the tape just goes under and around. With this one it doesn't. The
102way you actually thread the tape is you come down here, and follow these arrows
103around here, up here, around here, all the way up onto the take-up spool. Now
104that's a lot more steps than on an audio recorder. The reason this is so
105circuitous has to do with the actual shape of the recording mechanism itself.
106It's covered up by this plate here so I'll go ahead and pull it off, and we can
107start getting into the filth and complexity of this machine.
108
109## Operating principles
110
111There's plenty of bits and pieces down here but the money zone is this guy right
112here. This is the video recording head and it's definitely completely alien
113compared to an audio tape machine; but it's also pretty different compared to a
114typical VCR. But in order to explain those differences, I'm going to have to
115tell you a little bit about the theory of video recording. If you just take a
116peek through the flap on a VHS deck you'll see immediately the most interesting
117thing about VHS, which is the tilted metal cylinder in the back of the deck.
118This is called the drum assembly, and it contains anywhere from two to six video
119recording and playback heads. These are tiny elements with coils on them that
120can either detect a magnetic signal on a tape or lay down a new one. When you
121put a cassette into a VCR, the tape inside the cassette is pulled out and
122wrapped around this drum, which spins at somewhere over a thousand RPM. It's
123highly polished, so it doesn't produce much friction, which allows the tape to
124slide smoothly around it as it passes through the machine. As the drum spins the
125video heads are swept over the tape's surface at very high speed in order to
126achieve helical recording. A conventional audio tape uses linear recording, in
127which the audio signal is recorded as a continuous strip of varying magnetic
128fields along the whole length of the tape, but this is usually a very narrow
129strip; a 16th or a 32nd of an inch wide. This is how we're able to get multiple
130channels onto an audio tape, and even multiple sides, so you can flip it over
131and play a different set of tracks. There's enough room on there to pack two, or
132four, or, in professional settings, sometimes as many as 16, or 32 tracks of
133audio onto a single tape. With magnetic tape, the speed at which it moves
134determines how much bandwidth you have. When a tape moves faster past the
135recording head, you can get higher frequency signals onto it. With audio tape,
136it usually moves at between 7 and 15 inches per second, depending on how much
137quality the listener wants. If you want to record video onto tape in a linear
138fashion, you can't move it at 7 to 15 inches per second. You need more like 200.
139You could just use normal tape and move it that fast (that's what was done for
140early video tape experiments), but if you look at this footage, you can see that
141the tape reels themselves are gargantuan. They're the size of parmesan wheels,
142and they're moving so fast they're a blur. This was not practical even for
143businesses, but definitely not for consumers. It just eats up tape too fast.
144Helical recording is a really cool solution for this problem. Since you need the
145tape to move past the head really fast, but you don't need the recorded signal
146to be very wide, you can trade the width of the tape for linear speed. Tim
147Hunken demonstrated this way better than I possibly could in his 80s series _The
148Secret Life of Machines_, in which he takes a VHS drum assembly, and replaces
149the actual heads with a pair of markers. As he spins the drum, the marker leaves
150a black line where the magnetic signal would normally be recorded. As you can
151see, the black lines appearing on the tape here are at a diagonal to the tape,
152and as he moves the tape forward and spins the head again another black line
153gets laid down that's packed very closely next to the first one, but doesn't
154overlap. If you were to measure one of these strips, it's something like eight
155inches long, but since it's stored diagonally the tape only needs to be moved a
15616th of an inch in order to make room for another strip to get laid down, which
157means you're effectively getting 8 inches of tape space for only 1/16th inch of
158linear travel. Meanwhile, because the heads are spinning so fast, they're seeing
159the tape move past them relatively at 200 inches per second, even though in
160reality it's only moving at maybe an inch a second. So it makes sense
161mathematically that if you're using the full width of the tape instead of just a
162little bit, you're going to be able to store more data on it, but there's the
163problem that these are all distinct little stripes. It's not one continuous
164signal, so that seems pretty bad. There's an interruption at the end of each
165track. Well the fortunate thing is that video also contains interruptions.
166Analog video is not a continuous signal. It's sent as a series of distinct
167frames, each one being a full screen picture with a small gap in between, so the
168fact that each one of these is separate doesn't matter, because each one is a
169self-contained frame of video. The gap at the beginning and end can line up with
170the natural gaps that are in the video signal itself. All the same you don't
171want much gap, which is why the video drum has to contain at least two heads. As
172one is coming off the bottom of the tape finishing one frame of video, the next
173one is just starting to enter the top of the tape where it can begin the next
174frame of video. This technology squeezes more bandwidth out of tape than should
175really be possible, and it's an incredible achievement. It's also absolutely
176mandatory. It's the only way video has ever been recorded for production
177purposes. Going all the way back to the earliest era of videotape experiments in
178the mid 50s, no one was ever able to get a practical videotape recorder working
179without using this technique.
180
181## How It Works
182
183So this recorder here is really no different than any other in its basic
184function, but the details of how it achieves that helical recording are quite a
185lot different than any other videotape recorder you'll ever look at. So let's
186get in here, look at this thing, and see why it's so different than a VCR. This
187here is the video drum. Let me take this guard off so you can see the edge of
188the drum. In a vhs machine I'd be able to put my finger on the edge of this drum
189and spin it, but here, no dice. It's completely fixed in place. But let me take
190the top cover off the drum and show you why that is. Instead of the entire drum
191rotating, the heads themselves are mounted on this armature called the scanner,
192and this armature spins inside the drum assembly. This slot here allows the
193heads to come into contact with the tape. If I spin them around you can see that
194they just barely protrude from the slot, so they would touch the tape with just
195the slightest pressure. When I load the tape on this machine, it's going to be
196wrapped around this drum, so instead of the drum spinning, the heads inside spin
197and the drum just provides a path for the tape to follow. It does still spin
198just as fast as a VHS head however. I do wonder why they were using this
199approach of the stationary drum instead of a spinning one. The technology had
200been invented. In fact, at the same time this was being sold, Sony was selling
201pneumatic decks that were using video cassette and spinning heads. It really
202just looked like larger versions of vhs. I have to guess that this was done for
203cost savings. You don't have to balance any of this stuff. you only have to
204balance the internal armature which is probably a lot easier and cheaper to do
205by hand. but now let's look at the other difference between this and a VCR. If
206you look at the drum from the side, you'll see it's not tilted. now i just
207finished saying that all videotape is helically scanned so was I lying? Nope.
208The tape is scanned helically, just not by tilting the head. I'll go ahead and
209thread it now and show you how that works. so we start with the tape on the
210supply reel, get it loose here, and pull off a couple feet. Now first it has to
211go under this guide pin here. that keeps it taut. then it goes over this roller
212and around this roller here. Now this is the pinch roller. It squeezes the tape
213against the cap stand and allows it to be pulled through the machine. We come up
214around here, and over this guide pin here. Now this guide pin specifically is
215not straight. I'll show you a close-up of that, where you can see that it
216actually has a bevel on it. And it's kind of hard to see, but I believe that all
217the following components here are tilted back a little bit, because this is
218where the tape begins to curve. It's given a little bit of a tilt which makes it
219want to wrap, and to wrap in a downward angle. So we go across the erase head
220here, over another guide. Now we wrap the tape around the video drum, and it
221spirals downward as it goes. With the tape now wrapped around the drum in a
222spiral, even though the slot is in a straight line compared to the rest of the
223machine, relative to the tape it's a diagonal, and that way we get our helical
224recording. This is also why, if you notice, the reels are at different heights,
225because the tape actually descends as it wraps around the head. Then it lands on
226a guide pin here, then we go over the audio recording head. Now we should pause
227here for a moment and mention that the audio recording head does not spin. It is
228not part of the video head assembly, so the video head puts the video on there,
229and then the bottom part of the tape gets overwritten with a continuous ordinary
230channel of audio. However, because the tape is still passing this head at a
231diagonal, the head is actually tilted slightly, so that it'll be at the same
232azimuth as the tape. Then we go up around another guide pin, and make another
233corner, and again we have a flared bushing here, because it has to guide the
234tape at the same angle around the whole corner, and then we go under the tape
235sense bail. This is a little spring-loaded rod which presses against the tape,
236and if the tape runs out, then this’ll snap forward, and it shuts off the whole
237machine. Finally we come up over this pin here, and we can begin to wrap around
238the take up reel. Now I'm going to do that off camera because this one
239originally had, I believe, a sticky rubber center coating, but it doesn't
240anymore, so it's really fiddly to get the tape on here. All right, and with the
241tape threaded on here, we're now ready to record. Easy as pie. Anyone could do
242it.
243
244# Startup & Controls
245
246So now we're threaded up, and after getting the incredibly fiddly cover back on
247the mechanism, we're ready to play some video. I hooked up the ancient linear
248power supply that's somehow still working. Let's give it a shot! The machine is
249absolutely cacophonous. Here, get a taste. It makes a terrible racket, which is
250probably one of the reasons it has the lid, because it is a lot quieter with it
251on. It's a little better, but you still wouldn't want to use this thing at the
252opera. The video output itself is actually pretty clean. I'll show you some
253close-ups later, but here it is playing some Seinfeld that I dubbed on here, and
254while that's anachronistic, this was one of the options for using this machine.
255You could buy a television input adapter for it and use it to tape TV shows six
256years before Betamax came out and made a big deal out of doing the exact same
257thing. The only other reel controls here are fast forward, and rewind, which I
258don't want to engage right away, because I'm really worried I might break the
259machine. Neither one of them show you a picture while in operation, but I think
260they're actually supposed to. This machine is just not in the best condition so
261something's wrong with the timing circuitry. Also, if you have the machine
262stopped, and you hold the still image lever before going into play mode, it'll
263run the head without running the reels. Since the tape isn't moving, we have a
264rudimentary pause mode, but one where you can actually move the reels by hand to
265slide between frames. Now this is a feature that would become available on
266professional video decks fairly quickly, but wouldn't actually be available in
267the consumer market for 20 to 30 years. The fact you could use this for things
268like sports replays, and golf stroke analysis, and that sort of thing probably
269put this in the houses of a number of people who otherwise had no interest in
270video. as wild as this machine looks when you first glance at it, it's really
271pretty simple. Like, I think I could have designed it, and that's saying a lot.
272You want the tape to go a diagonal? Just bend it, who cares, nothing matters.
273What's funny about this is just that it's not terribly different from VHS and
274it's actual functionality, it's just that VHS has 10 times more parts entirely
275because of its automatic loading mechanism. Since you thread this thing by hand,
276it doesn't need any of the motors, cams, gears, steppers; all the stuff that
277makes VHS complicated really just comes down to getting the tape wrapped around
278the head. Once you've done that it's just this. and in fact even though i said
279this is different than an audio tape player, it's not really that much more
280complex. Most of the parts are the same; they've just been wrapped around this
281video drum. if you just replace the video drum with a normal linear tape head,
282you just have a quarter inch audio recorder. In fact, the controls aren't even
283any different. as you saw it only has forward, backward and stop. not really
284anything else. there's no extra controls because this thing has no intelligence.
285think about a VCR: when you press eject all this stuff has to happen. If the
286tape is playing then the machine has to stop, and unthread the tape, wait for
287the head to spin down, and has to put the tape back into the cassette, close the
288door, push the tape up, and spit it out the front. All these little mechanisms
289have to move at their own pace in exactly the right order, otherwise the whole
290thing goes to hell. This machine does none of that. The controls are fully
291manual.
292
293# The Insides
294
295take the play lever for instance. When you shift it into play, it's not asking
296the machine to go into play mode. it closes an electrical switch that powers up
297the transport and video head motors. That's it. It just plugs them into power.
298It physically moves a rubber roller to couple the transport motor to the tape
299spindles. This is the sort of mechanism you'd find inside of a record player
300from the 50s. Fast forward closes a different switch that makes the motors go
301faster, and rewind moves a different roller, which drives the supply rail
302backwards. The record switch energizes the video recording circuitry so that
303when you put it in play as the head is spinning, it'll record instead of
304playing. There's also the still switch which just interrupts power to the reel
305motors, and then there's the sound dub switch which just interrupts power to the
306video recording circuitry, but leaves the audio circuitry energized. That's it.
307These few functions are all this machine can do, and most of what they're doing
308isn't electronic. It's just moving levers and rollers. In fact, because it's all
309levers and rollers it ages just like a 1940s turntable. When I got this machine,
310sure enough, about half the controls were all gummed up. I could push on the
311audio dubbing lever, and it would just stay stuck over to the left, because all
312the nasty brown grease inside had dried up and turned into glue. Likewise, the
313record lever would return very slowly from the record position, so I had to open
314the machine up, and scrub all the surfaces to get all the gunk out of it. It
315took way longer than I ever would have expected from a piece of video equipment.
316You think of video gear as being full of tiny delicate parts, but this thing
317just looks like an ancient transmission inside. They glop the grease on these
318joints like they were building a Caterpillar bulldozer. I'm surprised it doesn't
319have Zerk fittings. I had to pop this E-clip here, at which point I found out it
320was also caked in grease. I pulled apart the mechanism under it, got under it
321with the isopropyl alcohol, and just scrubbed and scrubbed on it to get all this
322stuff off. I tried my best with the record lever as well, though it's really
323tough to get in there without doing way more disassembly than I'm prepared for,
324and after a while I had all the levers freed up and moving. It's just beyond
325strange to me after working with VCRs for most of my life to open up a machine
326like this and see that it's all just dumb barbarian pieces of sheet metal
327pushing on each other, and to accept that this somehow records a moving picture.
328It's just really tough for me. Video feels like it should be too sophisticated
329for this to work, but it does. Don't get me wrong, there are electronics in
330there, but most of this thing's bulk seems to be made out of levers, and
331pulleys, and belts. It's like a steampunk VCR.
332
333# The Kit Camera
334
335Now before we get too excited we should see how this actually performs, and to
336do that we're going to need a video input now. As I said earlier, you could use
337this to record live television, but that's not really what it was for. This was
338intended to be used as a portable video recorder. you were supposed to take this
339to birthday parties, and parades, and soccer matches, so it is the forerunner of
340the modern camcorder. The carrying case has cutouts, which expose the ports, so
341you can connect the camera, and the controls, so you can operate the machine
342while carrying it around. There's also connections on the back for a backpack
343straps, so you can carry it around for long periods, without the imbalanced
344weight of a shoulder strap. There's also this little pouch on the side for an
345earbud, so you can monitor your audio in the field. This is the sort called a
346crystal earpiece which uses a little piezoelectric diaphragm to make sound.
347These were pretty much the only kind of earbud that existed at this time, and
348they had the benefit of being very loud, even with a very low power signal. On
349the machine itself there's a door on the bottom which unscrews and allows you to
350install a lead acid battery, which I definitely don't have. In fact, I had to
351build an adapter cord to hook this up to a lithium ion pack, and that's how I
352killed my first machine. I was hooking it up to a battery pack and I got the
353leads backwards for just an instant and blew every transistor in the device. I
354had double checked, and triple checked, but I should have quadruple checked. Now
355I have a battery pack that has labels all over it that say where to put in the
356negative and the positive, and I still double and triple check every single
357time. but at any rate, the AV-3400 was sold as a portable video recording
358system, so it came with a camera; the AVC 3400. This is that. I really like how
359the recorder and the camera have the exact same visual style. It makes sense
360since they were being sold together but it's particularly nice because at this
361time companies have not yet switched to monochromatic paint jobs, so we get this
362sort of cream instead of just white or gray, and we get this nice red down here.
363I'd love to show you how this thing works except it doesn't. It doesn't actually
364produce a picture, and the CRT on the back just produces a really messed up
365raster. I suspect that it's close to working. It probably just needs a recap or
366something, but that's way beyond my capabilities. With some electronics, I could
367pull it off, but this thing is just a completely tangled mess of tied up bundles
368of wire, and point-to-point connections, and really dense through-hole circuitry
369that's way beyond my skill set. This won't be a problem (I have other cameras
370that work), but let's take a look at what Sony was shipping with this recorder
371anyway. This camera is black and white, and is based around a kind of vacuum
372tube technology called a vidicon, which is actually a sort of cathode ray tube
373that captures an image instead of displaying one. The tube is kind of buried in
374the circuitry, but you can just make it out inside the camera here. It's
375basically a TV tube running in reverse, and it's a technology I've been dying to
376explain to you for years. I'll get around to it eventually, but just like more
377recent cameras it outputs a normal composite television signal, so this is just
378a video camera. As I mentioned a few times before, prior to the invention of the
379camcorder, all cameras used an identical 10-pin plug with a standard pin out. It
380carries a bunch of signals like video in and out, audio in and out, a record
381on/off signal, and power. This connector was used on hundreds of cameras, but
382this one might have been the first that actually intended to use this as a
383standard connector, or I think more likely, in classic Sony style, the
384“standard” that everyone used was just whatever Sony was already doing. On the
385back we have a built-in CTR viewfinder, probably about an inch across, typical
386of pretty much all cameras prior to the 90s, and on the front of course we have
387the lens. Now this lens here is a pretty typical C-mount lens that you'd find on
388most video cameras or even some security cameras. You could actually interchange
389this with others, although I've tried putting this lens on my other C-mount
390cameras and like, the flange focal distance isn't right. In here you can
391actually see the face of the video tube. It's not much to look at, but yeah
392that's the front of a CRT. I do love how absolutely beefy this mount is. I don't
393know why it's this big, and actually, this here unscrews for some reason. This
394reveals that this thing is just built like a tank. There's this massive brass
395mounting ring up here, and I suspect that some of this is probably for tuning
396this in some way, maybe like aligning the tube or something. I don't know.
397Again, much like the rest of this machine, it's pretty barbarian. It also has
398this enormous mic diaphragm up here. I have no idea what's behind this, and at
399this time this really should have been a little tiny electric mic, so I don't
400know why this thing is so big. The only other thing on here is this guy here,
401which is the record start/stop button, and that's it. There's not much else to
402look at. Now there's no great way to hold this camera, and that's because it's
403actually not complete. You're supposed to mount it on a tripod, or, for handheld
404use, you're supposed to use the original included pistol grip. This here is the
405pistol grip, for handheld use. It actually screws into the tripod socket, and it
406also screws in right where the cable is. I have no idea why they decided to put
407the cable, uh, here instead of maybe on the back of the camera. I don't know
408what that decision was, but consequently this actually runs into it but they've
409put this hole here and a little routing slot in the back, so to install this you
410put the cable through the hole, and then run the tripod screw down. It's, uh,
411kind of an awkward design, but it works. Now there's a pair of rods here which
412flip out from the grip, and I assumed that these would make the camera sit
413straight up on a table, as a little mini tripod, but they don't. They just make
414it sit at this weird angle, and I don't really know why. I'm not sure what this
415is for. I guess if you were like, I don't know, taking video of a sports game
416and you were up on the high balcony, you could put this up on a table and it
417would shoot down towards the field. I can't think of any other possible use for
418it. It's not just to hold the camera up off a surface because it lays just fine.
419I mean, it's just sheet metal. Who cares? I can't make any sense of this bipod,
420and there's no mention of it in the manual that I’ve seen. Now this trigger here
421tells the camera to start and stop recording, but there's no electrical
422connection between this grip and the camera. Instead, when you squeeze this, it
423just pushes on the same rod that operates the start/stop switch on the camera
424itself. Pretty clever right? Now when you press this switch it connects the 12
425volts that's running the camera to one of the pins in the EIAJ connector, which
426goes back to the recorder, and activates a solenoid, which presses the pinch
427roller against the cap stand, grabbing the tape, and pulling it through the
428machine. If you press it again, it releases the pinch roller, and the tape is no
429longer being pulled through the machine, so you're paused. So that's the tour of
430the camera itself. It's very bare bones. It looks nice. It was probably
431reasonably decent when it was new. It just doesn't really do very much. All the
432smarts are in the recorder itself.
433
434# The Camera Situation/Field Tests
435
436Now while we want to test that recorder, and I do have other cameras that'll
437plug into it, I can't just pick any one of them, if you want to get a sense of
438what using this machine was like when it was new. For instance, I have a Hitachi
439camera here from 1984. It also has an EIAJ plug on it. It'll plug into this
440recorder and it'll record video just fine, but it's not going to show you what
441using this recorder was like when it was new. But hey, let's see how that looks.
442Over the weekend, I took this camera and recorder to a friend's birthday party.
443By the way, since I don't have the original battery, like I said, I had to build
444an adapter to run this off a 12-volt lithium pack that I have, and I had to have
445a friend carry it behind me the whole time like a machine gun loader. Here, in
446the almost direct sunlight outside, you can make out my friend and his kid, and
447the cars and houses behind him. It's black and white, and kind of blurry and
448ghosty, but it's mostly passable. Then I go into the house, but notice as I go
449inside the house, the camera adjusts to the much lower light level just fine.
450You don't even notice that it's 100 times dimmer inside than outside. You're
451probably used to this from your smartphone camera, but it's not actually how
452things worked in 1969. This camera from 69 and this camera from 84 are both
453based on video tube technology, and video tubes used to have very poor light
454sensitivity. It's just that this one is from 1984, when they'd made big strides
455in that particular problem. If I compare it to a camera from just a few years
456earlier, in 1981, the difference is night and day. Why am I talking about these?
457It'll all make sense in a couple minutes. Don't worry.
458
459# Various Camera Tests
460
461This footage is being recorded on my 1984 camera, plugged into the videotape
462recorder i've just been showing you, under the normal office lighting in my
463studio. That is to say, I turned off my great big led floodlights. So, if you
464were in a 1969 household, it wasn't going to be much brighter than this, and
465probably quite a bit dimmer. Now, this may not look incredible. It probably
466doesn't look as good as your smartphone does, but it looks passable. You know,
467if you were shooting video at a party and it looked like this it would probably
468be okay. But now, this is my 1981 camera under the same lighting conditions and
469it's atrocious. I look like I'm in the movie _Pi_. The light fall-off and
470contrast is just awful. and this is what you could expect from that original
4711969 camera. It really wouldn't perform very well indoors. you were expected to
472shoot under extremely bright video lights like these, which weren't really
473practical for use in casual settings, or you were supposed to shoot outdoors.
474Out here in the direct sunlight this camera performs much better than it did
475indoors, and this is the kind of performance you could expect from the camera
476that came with the AV-3400. so, you weren't really going to have the mid-80s
477experience of shooting hours of party footage indoors in dimly lit houses to
478upload to youtube 25 years later for future generations to enjoy. you could
479maybe shoot video of a parade, or your kids soccer match, but that was about it.
480What's interesting about this is that the low quality of these cameras really
481did the recorder dirty. Let me show you what I mean.
482
483# Modifications! Oh no!
484
485Let's go back to the machine itself for the moment. To make this thing usable
486for my purposes in the modern world, I had to make a couple modifications.
487First, I needed to get a video output jack, so I could capture the footage that
488I'd recorded on here for this video, but this doesn't have a video output
489because in 1969 televisions didn't have video inputs. Nobody had a use for that
490sort of thing, so TVs only had an antenna input. I addressed this in my previous
491video about how the NES is actually a little television transmitter. Sony used
492the same solution. They used an RF modulator, which plugs into a bay on the
493bottom of the machine, and then connects to the antenna input on your
494television, and you just tune to channel three or four or whatever. RF
495modulators require a baseband video input to function, however, so I knew I
496could tee off of one of the pins here to get my video output, and sure enough
497the pins on the modulator are actually labeled, so I didn't have to do any work
498to figure out which one was which. I soldered on a pair of RCAs and I can now
499get clean audio and video out of the machine. But I also built an adapter cable,
500so I could get video into the machine. I had a spare EIAJ extension laying
501around, so I took one end off and soldered on a breadboard and a couple RCA
502cables.
503
504# Raw Video Demo
505
506That's how I was able to get Seinfeld on here. I plugged this into my Raspberry
507Pi and dubbed it from an AVI. Other than the distortions from the machine being
508old, and the tape being beat up, and of course the lack of color, it looks
509basically like a VHS recording. The resolution looks fine. In other words, it
510seems like the recorder captures excellent quality footage, but unless you were
511taping TV shows, you wouldn't have known that back when it was new, because the
512only cameras available at the time were terrible, and also the quality of the
513picture from tube cameras is bad in ways that go beyond the light sensitivity
514problems.
515
516# The Camera Problem
517
518For instance, here's the raw output from the better of my videotube cameras, the
5191984 one, and as you can see even under excellent studio lighting and the ideal
520possible conditions it doesn't look very good. It's blurry and the colors are
521washed out and it just kind of looks ghosty. This, as far as I can tell, is just
522how video tube cameras were. I mean, it's possible that all of mine are just
523suffering the effects of age, but the trouble with that is we have footage from
524back when these things were new, and it doesn't seem like they looked much
525better back then either. This, for instance, is from the video freaks, whose
526footage I've used before, because they're one of the better examples of
527well-preserved early amateur video. This was shot in about 1973, and very
528possibly on the original AVC-3400 camera, and you can tell it still has the same
529problems. The focus might be a little better, but the dynamic range isn't great,
530so there's blown out areas where there's direct sunlight, and it's often muddy
531and hard to see what's going on. I've looked at a few other rips of EIAJ video
532and they all seem to share similar problems, so it really looks like the state
533of the art in consumer cameras was just garbage for almost two decades.
534
535# Conclusion
536
537Like I copped to earlier, these things probably had very little impact on the
538consumer market, and now having seen all this footage you can probably guess
539why. I think the cameras just hamstrung them, and kept them from being as
540popular as they could have been. 8mm and 16mm film movie cameras couldn't record
541for as long, but otherwise the quality was far and away superior, at least from
542what I've seen. supporting this notion the two machines I have both have asset
543tags on them from universities, so they weren't bought by consumers. They were
544probably bought either by a film department or like a journalism class so people
545could do mock television interviews, that sort of thing. but either way, they
546weren't being used to film birthday parties and soccer matches. you could
547certainly haul this igloo cooler size thing out to your kids soccer match, and
548sit there for an hour rolling tape but when you get home you're not going to be
549able to make out where the ball is, so these things probably weren't flying off
550the shelves for that purpose. also you might be wondering why I haven't played
551any of the audio recorded on the machine. If you didn't notice, I've just been
552using the lapel mic. That's because the machine expects a really low amplitude
553audio signal and all my cameras output an amplified one for some reason; so if I
554play it back off the tape it sounds like this. so that's the first real consumer
555video recorder in a nutshell. On the one hand it didn't really matter. I don't
556think anybody really bought it other than institutions, that sort of thing. On
557the other hand it has such intense cultural energy. I just can't not be
558impressed by it. I feel like I should have more to say. Despite photography,
559and, in fact, the moving picture being over 70 years old when this thing came
560out, the era of eternal recording, of the implicit capture of all of life's
561moments onto videotape, was nowhere close to beginning. This machine was
562supposed to kick-start it. It was supposed to put a video camera in every
563consumer's hands, but that didn't happen and it would take the invention of
564video cassette and the camcorder, nearly 15 years later, before it happened.
565This thing didn't ultimately really matter but it is a hell of a conversation
566piece.