Growing up in the 1980s, most of us kids believed that the year 2001 would be, well, kind of like
the movie 2001. Space stations, colonies on the moon, etc. Omega Race, the game I grew up
playing on my Commodore VIC-20 was supposed to take place in the year 2003, for example! And
according to Back to the Future, just a few years later we’d have flying cars and hologram movies.
OK, so clearly our expectations were set too high and when 2001 arrived, it was kind of a let down.
But there were some devices that were not predicted by movies that actually turned
out to feel rather futuristic. And this is an example of just such a device. Yep,
it’s a video camera from the year 2001. But this camera has a few tricks up its sleeve
that makes it interesting, including a built in photo printer, right here.
Thinking about camcorders, for example. One of the first compact all-in-one camcorders was
the JVC GR-C1, which you may know as Marty McFly’s camcorder in Back to the Future.
It’s sort of hard to believe that when looking at the time line,
more time has passed between the introduction of this Sony camera and today, than there was
between this product and Marty’s McFly’s JVC GR-C1 from 1985. Yep, this product is 20 years old now!
And while this camera does use 8 mm cassettes, it actually records
everything as a digital signal. The format is known as Digital-8 and was introduced in 1999.
This camera actually belongs to a friend of mine who lives in town. He also owns another piece of
vintage technology, a 1988 Toyota MR-2. We took a drive around town to take some footage with
the camera. So everything you are about to see was recorded on this 20 year old camera.
That’s a lot lower than I was expecting.
He actually let me take the driver’s seat. It’s been quite a while since I
drove a manual transmission and I was a bit nervous how I would do.
All right. It’s been a while. Here we go. Well,
I didn’t stall the engine.
I guess it’s like riding a bicycle. You never really forget. We actually had plans to take some
video of the stone monuments in Arlington, but there was a football game happening that day and
that part of town was impossible to find a parking spot. So we drove around for a bit. And one thing
that I noticed immediately about this camera is the image stabilization. Or rather the lack
of it. Actually, this camera has Sony’s steady shot technology which was enabled at the time of
recording, but it was just no match for driving on the bumpy road. Needless to say, that technology
has come a long way over the last 20 years. It does have a pretty good zoom lens, though.
Anyway, we eventually stopped at Ripley’s Believe it or Not. It’s a wax museum. We didn’t go
inside. But there were plenty of interesting things in the parking lot to take video of.
Actually, what we were really looking for were some colorful things to take
still photos of to try out the built in printer.
So, I thought we’d just try out the camera here in the studio and kind of see what it
looks like in here. What would it be like if I had to film my show on a camera like this? And
I also have a little treat for you, this is the Commodore 128 version of Petscii Robots which
runs on dual-monitors. I thought you might want to get a little sneak preview of that.
And so we’ll just have a look around the rest of the studio. Back here I’ve got the
Laser 128 up and running. And here’s studio room 2. One thing that’s super obvious about working
with this camera inside the studio is how narrow the field of view is. It’s really hard to capture
any footage in here. There is a wide-angle lens option, but I’m not using it right now.
So, first thing I want to do is actually try printing a photo from the little printer.
I’m actually not sure what sort of technology this is. It actually has some sort of little dry
ink cartridge, which I’ll show in a minute. But whatever it is, it still works after 20 years. It
actually pulls the paper in and out 3 different times and adds a little more color with each
pass. And you know what? It doesn’t actually look half bad. I mean, these photos are really small.
But even up close like this, it has plenty of detail. Of course, it is basically NTSC
resolution, so probably 720 by 480 or something like that. But the colors are very vibrant!
Of course, if you want to copy the video off you’ll need to connect it to firewire. I mean,
you could capture it from the analog output, but using firewire keeps the signal digital from the
time you film it to the time it ends up on your computer. And we should use an era appropriate
computer Yep, this computer here came out the same year as the camera. So it’s a perfect match!
It even has a firewire port. Unfortunately, I ran into one stupid problem. I couldn’t find
a copy of QuickTime Pro that works on this machine. As you can see, movie recording is
grayed out in the regular version of quicktime. You had to buy a license for QuickTime Pro.
I spent hours trying to locate one. Of course Apple doesn’t even sell it anymore. So
after a while I just gave up. Instead I decided to go with an older MacBook that still has firewire
on the side. And it had a more modern version of quicktime and had no trouble capturing the video.
One thing I’d like to mention about this camera is that it does have an unusually
large display for the time. In fact, it’s even larger than many camcorders today!
Speaking of capturing. This camera has another nifty feature.
A former co-worker of mine, Brian Hughes, recently found these old VHS tapes from AST.
One of them is about the Ascentia laptops, and I’m not sure what these other two tapes are. They’re
still shrink-wrapped. So we’re going to have to cut the open. Anyway, the thing is, the camera has
analog inputs and will convert any analog source over to firewire. And it does a really good job.
It’s actually one of the best video capture devices probably ever made!
And so it allowed me to capture the video from these old cassettes.
It really wasn’t anything terribly interesting. One cassette was an
internal training video on how to repair the Ascentia 800 and 900 laptops.
However, it really well done considering this was made in 1994. The other video was a few
years later and this was a recording of a live Q and A video that they broadcast on a satellite TV
channel and allowed 3rd party service centers to call in with questions. It’s actually really long
and boring. And I didn’t recognize anyone from the video except this guy here, named Mujeeb. He
was in charge of the entire tech support facility where I worked, but I never really spoke to him.
Anyway, as you can see, the quality of the video capture is second to none.
So, what else could we try capturing? I have my Commodore Plus/4 setup here, and
sure enough, I can connect it to the video input and see the screen.
I’ve been testing out the Plus/4 version of Petscii Robots so I’ll go ahead and load this up.
And there we go! Now, believe it or not, I can press the photo button here and it will store
this photo to the SD card just like any other photo. And of course, guess what you can do with
any photo stored on the SD card? That’s right, you can print it. So let’s print a screenshot
of Petscii Robots. I’ll spare you the nearly 2 minutes it takes to print the photo. But
here you go. It actually looks amazingly good. About my only complaint is that it
doesn’t show the lights in the building very well. I mean, you can see them,
but they don’t show up as well as on the actual game. But otherwise, it looks great!
So I hooked up the C128 so I could take a few more screenshots of popular games.
I mean, in theory you could connect a Nintendo, Sega genesis, or whatever. As long as it has
composite or S-video output. Oh, and did you know this thing has two color screens?
Yep, if you look inside the little viewfinder here, you’ll find a second full color screen.
So, here are some of the other screenshots I took.
So yeah, if you want physical screenshots from your games and
you don’t mind that they are credit-card sized, this thing does an amazing job.
OK, so in summary, we have this device that was made 20 years ago. And it was a digital video
camera, that in and of itself was a bit unusual at the time, it was also a digital still camera.
It was also an analog-to-digital capture device, and a photo printer! All in one! Plus,
it also had some other neat features like night vision and stuff like that,
which was pretty cool at the time. But you know what the most amazing thing about this camera is?
The battery! According to my friend Sean, this is the original battery from 20 years ago and it
still works! Granted, it doesn’t work for hours like it is supposed to. But I think
we got about 45 minutes out of it when we were driving around town. So, anyway,
I know it’s a little bit off from my usual content, but I thought this was at least worth
a short video just to talk about some of the cool things that came out in the early 2000s.
There is something else I wanted to tell you about in this video.
My brother, and I, and another friend of ours named Craig have been doing this podcast for a
couple of months now called The GeekBits Podcast. So, it comes out about once a week, and it’s just
the 3 of us sitting around talking about all kinds of philosophical things whether it be science
fiction, or D&D, or video games, or whatever. If you’re interested, I’ll put a link down in
the description. But that about wraps it up for this episode. As always, thanks for watching.