I saw it but I managed to ignore it. The four noble truths are the existence of dukkha, the causes of dukkha, that there is a way to cease dukkha, and the way to cease dukkha. That way is the noble eightfold path. And with right concentration I did not stare at it. Thanks Buddha Gotama!
I agree the Fisher price camera is probably the camera used to produce the clearest of those U.F.O./ Sasquatches/bigfoots/ Chupacabras/ Loch Ness monster and any I did not list
Im sure that camera is literally just a cheap CCTV camera from the time in a plastic case. The fact is does so well with IR is telling of this too. Also i have 2 of those long yellow cables this came with. Picked them up years and years ago and never knew what they came with. Now i know!
Ooooohhhh, I'm really glad that you decided to see how it would work under incandescent lighting! I could easily have imagined it being something that would be overlooked, and left a much worse overall impression had you not realized this fact! Thanks for the great video!
Chaos89P I do believe it could have been as well, just giving credit to the fact he thought of it and went out his way to showcase it! Let's people of whom may want to collect one definitively know, and makes for better overall content
I noticed back when we got one how well it lit up from the tv remote. I assumed the cheapest video sensor they could find was the kind used for video security cameras, which are supposed to be used with an infra red spotlight.
It was a common issue with older camcorders which were less light sensitive than higher end or more modern devices that using LED and fluorescent lamps produced bad image quality. That is because their light spectrum is typically not providing flat values on all frequencies, but instead they often give strong spikes at certain frequencies. Incandescent lightning normally has quite smooth range of light frequencies. Human eye won't properly distinguish such irregularity, although incandescent lightning might vaguely feel more "soft". I'm assuming this should still affect more modern cameras as well, but since the newer camera sensors tend to be otherwise better by average, this issue is less noticeable. Also most CCD image sensors natively receive infrared light, however, consumer devices usually were actually added an IR filter to block out infrared, since it can cause certain image smearing, colour distortion etc. So technically when certain camcorder producers started to provide night vision gimmicks by IR sensor, it was not really about adding a new feature, but instead just releasing a handicap normally active. Obviously on that cheap Tyco camera they've saved on production costs and have not added the filter lens.
This was probably the best thing I had as a child. Brand new it came in the vicinity of 100 dollars. I think it was $120 Australian. Loads of fun Edit: That cable was so annoying... But it was still awesome
Wow I have that same exact camera I got it for Christmas 1996 from toys "R" Us in Columbia, MO I recorded a lot of videos with it. I actually did go to RadioShack and get a longer cable for it so I could go all over our house! It did cost around $50 I still have it to this day with the original box and all the paperwork! Great video thank you so much for making it!
What's interesting about this VHS connected camcorder is that back in the 80's, my uncle actually had a video camera that didn't have its own tape mechanism inside of it. It connected to an external, battery powered VHS recorder that he carried in a bag over his shoulder. If a kid had found that recorder, this would be a complete portable recording solution.
Kazriko Redclaw that's why the camcorder is called so, because it was both a camera and a recorder. before the camcorder you had to have a camera and a recorder.
I have stashed away a portable VHS recorder (sadly doesn't work right any more) from the 80s which you can plug cameras into (including this tyco I'm sure), I also have a complete Sony Betamax SL-F1UB kit with the recorder, tuner-timer unit, and over-the-shoulder camcorder, and believe me, I'm GLAD that camcorders were created and shrank down so much over the years, that kit is hard on your shoulders and arms!! :S
@Nukleon I didn't know that. I don't think I've ever seen a stand along VHS recorder that wasn't a VCR like you'd play movies on. I've seen standalone cameras, but those where studio equipment
I haven't seen one in person, but I have an old VHS book (from 1986 or so) that mentioned these. The tuner and VHS recorder would be separate units, and the recorder part was portable and could be connected to a camera and then would “dock” into the tuner unit to function like an ordinary home VCR.
I was lucky enough to get one of these for Christmas, and I seem to remember it being around £100 (GBP) from our town's Co-Op department store. Our VCR at the time had a "title" function that allowed you to display (and therefore, record) text characters on the screen, presumably to help you identify what's on each tape. Although painstaking, I used this to generate name straps and title cards for all the homemade "TV shows" I filmed in our front room! 😄
Oh wow, you did one of these! This was my first ever camera. I remember learning the hard way that the "pause" function on a VCR isn't precise enough to make stop-motion videos with your Transformers toys! Eventually I ended up taking the thing apart and stuffing the guts into a "modified" tissue box to make a spy camera. A *totally* inconspicuous spy camera with a bright yellow cord trailing out the back...
This brought back some great memories that me and my sibling used to have, making our own "tv shows" and "mini films" we used to have 2 vhs tapes to our name at one point and would just continually record over them. If we had spent alot of time on something we might even show it to our parents after dinner and have a "movie night" with it. Those were some great times!
I remember the commercial for that from when I was seven years old! It looked neat, but I didn't need it because my dad would let me borrow his old VHS-C camcorder from time to time (yes, I was careful with it.) And it also shot in color and recorded onto its own storage media, compared to TYCO's VideoCam. This is from near the end of TYCO's run. Their stuff in the mid-90s was a far cry from in the 70s and 80s, when they were producing slot cars and model trains!
For those too young to remember very early home video cameras attached to a battery-powered VHS machine that you slung over your shoulder. If you could have mated one of those [perhaps a garage sale find in 96?] with the Tyco, a kid would be good to go!
I had an old Beta "over the shoulder" rig like that. After about an hour, everything hurt from lugging that 40lb mass of electronics around! I finally got smart and got a ruckpack and stuffed it all in there. No lighter, but easier on my shoulders. The 45 minute battery (the size of a house brick) actually got drained a few times after that!
I really wouldn't rely on that soft picture for security. Even my standard definition infrared security camera on one of the corners on my home, has a far sharper resolution.
Compared to other security cameras of the time, the quality isn't bad. A shame about the brightness though. I wonder how much an outdoor infrared floodlight would have been at the time this was released?
I had one of these when I was young. My father was a tv technician and got a hold of one of these. I have no clue where the camera is now today but I have both those yellow cables still to this day. I used to use them for my headphones from my amp before the days of mp3 players and smart phones.
I had this exact camera as a kid! I have been trying to remember what kind of camera it was for years. Thanks for covering this and bringing back a bunch of great/hilarious memories.
I remember seeing the commercial for this thing back in the day, an laughing my ass off when the kid plugged it into his VCR, I guess because my family by that point had already had a VHS Camcorder for about 8 or 9 years.
Wow, that was a very interesting found on that infrared binary via interlaced video from the camera! Just another adventure with The 8-Bit Guy, awesome as always, sir!
i never thought of infrared stuff for the camera sensor issue... great tutorial! very informative and i like the way each time when you dig out old components out of old devices you explain the mechanism how it works
We had that particular camera including the yellow cable. As a 12 and 8 year old (brother and me), boy did we have fun with it. Now we could anchor our own news and record our grandparents, which never believed we recorded the stuff. Brings back good memories.
I got mine for Christmas in 1997, and I still have it. I'm pretty sure the logo of the font was different. Mine is missing the battery door so I can't tell for sure. I used to use it mostly on AC power (yes, another cord) because I seem to remember it eating through batteries pretty quickly. It was definitely $100 at that time -- I remember it saying so in the catalogs at the time and it was a really big deal when I got it because it was such a costly item.
I got very excited when I saw this review! This camera was my childhood. I have VHS tapes upon VHS tapes of footage I am slowly converting. You could get extension cords for the yellow cable up to a certain footage, maybe 100 feet. I had this thing all over the house and backyard with those. You had to get creative in movies when the person in the scene had to hit record and then sprint across the house to get in the shot haha. Cuts were easy because you could just rewind back to where you wanted the next scene to start. I believe my parents paid $100 right near release. It was my favorite gift of my childhood!
every once in a while I stubble upon a great channel. I found your channel through one of your restoration videos. i have since watched every video both on this channel and your 8 bit keys channel. I had zero interest in these things beforehand, but after your videos Id like to get my hands on some of these things. thank you!
I had one of these as a kid. I purchased it with my savings at the time and it was £29.99 GBP at the time. But I got a second hand tripod and filmed outside with it and produced my own episodes of Dr.Who. I seem to remember hooking up a jack-to-jack cable to a Walkman at the time and playing it back to my VCR later on. I'd love to see you try it out. I also remember filming the live output on the TV to get the infinite tunnel effect from Dr.Who opening sequence. What a blast from the past. Thanks for showing this.. so much Nostalgia.
I think so, too. When I used my camera back in 1999, it produced slightly sharper images, although the picture edges were as out of focus as in the video.
Chewing Salad All cheap lenses even today are softer at the edges, especially at big apertures. The lens of this videocamera has a very small aperture for a reason. A smaller aperture gives bigger depth of field. So everything is in focus and there is not need for focus ring and extra cost. A smaller aperture helps the lens to be a sharp as possible with less chromatic aberration and vignetting (less need for expensive optics). The drawback of a small aperture is that less amount of light is passing to the film or the image sensor. Cheap Kodak photographic film cameras didn't have focus ring due to their fixed small aperture. To compensate the problem of poor indoor lighting, flash cubes where used. In the case of cameras the flash isn't a solution. All modern image sensors have low pass infrared fIlter. The human eye have infrared and ultraviolet filter(as long as you don't have a cataract surgery). For lowering the cost the Tyco camera manufacturer didn't installed a low pass filter. Actually it took advantage of that. Home video cameras even during late 90's were expensive equipments. The video recording mechanism inside the video camera was unavoidably complex, very small and expensive. The Tyco camera has as few features and components as possible. I doubt if it's lens has more than the typical three elements. Probably just one meniscus element. Even that element after some drops must have been moved slightly and it is out of focus. The quality of optics is an issue that even today ordinary consumers ignore. Cheap digital cameras nowadays can correct issues of cheaper optics digitally from inside. For example geometric distortion, vignetting, contrast, sharpness, chromatic aberration are typically digitally corrected inside the smartphones and compact cameras. This helps manufacturers to avoid more expensive lenses and higher cost. Of course these digital corrections are rarely as good as those with a computer. That's why recently many smartphones and compacts cameras support raw photo files which can be processed with programs like Lightroom.
One common problem with the Fisher-Price Pixel Vision camera is an optical low pass filter between the lens and sensor would get discolored over the years and considerably degrade the image. The fix was simply to remove that square piece and it would brighten up the image considerably. I wonder if there's an equivalent thing going on with the Tyco cam. And also, the lens might be manually adjustable; I know from working with CCD board cameras of similar vintage that many of these had lenses that manually focus. Or the board camera might have slightly moved its position relative to the lens, perhaps due to warping of the plastic body of the camera.
Wow - this takes me back down memory lane! Back in 1999/2000 I bought 15 of these, end of line from a south London toy store for £10 ($12) each and re-sold them mostly to work colleagues (in the BBC!). I still have the stand and long yellow cable for the one I kept for myself. One thing you COULD do if you pulled it apart was refocus it slightly - you could get a sharper image because just about every one I tried was ever so slightly out of focus, though you had to break the glued seal for the actual camera lens to do this, but once done, the re-focusing was easy. The camera itself was tiny compared to the plastic housing that made it look more like a camcorder and as you have correctly surmised, it was pretty much an infra red camera being very sensitive to IR and terrible at visible light - I even created an infra red lamp out of 12 IR LEDs and mounted it in my attic, pointing at a bird's next there to be able to watch the nest on my TV when the attic itself was otherwise in total darkness! The IR sensitivity became obvious when pointing at some things - my Mission 70 loudspeakers for my HiFi were jet black in normal light, yet when using this camera they appeared light grey and you could see through the black fabric cover and see the speakers themselves. Lighting, even using the early "low energy" light bulbs (the twisted florescent type) was awful compared to incandescent bulbs and, although I haven't tried it out for a very long time now, I'm not surprised at your results with LED bulbs. A colleague had made an exceptionally bright (and dangerous) IR lamp using one of those old "million candle power" large flashlights and placing an industrial IR filter in front of its lens which absorbed 99% of visible light letting through only IR - this camera was AWESOME to use at night for recording wildlife, using this lamp (though the lamp itself did overheat and started melting after a minute or two's use!!) The version I had of the camera was the 50Hz UK/European version and once taken completely apart, the minimal circuit board made no mention of Tyco - however I do remember it did have the words "Shoot the moon" written on it. One other thing I remember doing with it was mounting the small internal camera (minus the plastic faux camcorder housing in your video) on my car's bumper with gaffer tape (the UK equivalent to duct tape) and took a full sized VHS recorder in the car, powered by a computer UPS and recorded my 40 minute journey from work to home along London's orbital M25 motorway! That could be done very easily these days of course with a GoPro but remember, this was back in 1999! Apart from being 50 frames per second for the European market, the only other difference between the ones I bought to the one you show here is that the ones I bought didn't come with the carry case.
I was surprised at the microphone quality. It was really not terrible. I'm always interested in stuff from 1996 specifically since it was the year I was born.
I was thinking about something that could be done with this camera. With a tiny computer like a raspberry pi, or something a bit more powerful, and a USB video capture dongle, it should be possible to build a cheap and compact digital recorder for that camera. Even better, add a LCD screen and now you have a complete digital camcorder.
Nostalgia! I had one of these as a kid, best Christmas present I ever received! Wish I still had some of the videos I made. When I got older I got curious and opened it up. It’s mostly an empty box, circuit board with the camera in the lens and cables leading to the outputs / battery!
Oh man, I remember having one of these cameras as a kid and making all sorts of films on it, I remember very fondly animating my legos with it using a time-lapse vcr? or something like that (averaged about 12fps). Ours came with the big, bright yellow 30ish foot cable that would run all through the house and annoy everyone.
Great review of the Tyco video cam... I was one of those lucky children that had one of these for Christmas in 1996, I absolutely loved it! I believe it sold in the UK for around £50! Great memories! 👍🏼
I got one of these for my birthday or Christmas in '96 or '97. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw this video. Now I want to know what happened to it and the VHS tapes I recorded to. Probably best that they're gone. I'm sure I'd be mortified by my 12 year old nerdy self on the tapes. :)
I recently captured footage off my PXL when I was in grade 3. I had no idea I talked so much, and with such eloquence and insight. Barely any video made it through though, I think there's 3-4 seconds of me on there out of the 3 tapes I pulled content from.
Great video! My family could not afford a regular camcorder. I did get this Tyco Video Camera one Christmas and loved it. I have stacks of VHS tapes with my silly antics. I too tried to do Lego Animation by painstakingly pausing record for every frame. My cousins and friends tried to make a movie. We used the yellow extension cord outside. The videos help me revisit my childhood. :)
I used to have one of these as a kid. I remember attaching mine to a transmitter strapping it to my RC car and driving it around the house and yard. Hours of fun.
Hehe. Did you get a price? ^_^ (I actually started watching it right as it was published, but I couldn't finish it because the scaffolding tower wouldn't build itself. I'm filming an airshow on Sunday and preparations starts today)
Oh my.. is it your birthday today?! :O Congratulations! Did you get my cassette already? If not, maybe I should arrange a little late birthday present... ;)
I had this camera when I was younger and filmed my own TV news show. Haha it was great. It featured news, weather, and sports. I had made advertisements and cards to display to the camera to show various captions. This camera for the time was very good for kids. What a time to be a kid!
I didn't fell for it. And I can promise that I never will when this "joke" is made in English. My UA-cam never say "read more" Conclusion: English speakers are dumber
I have a personal experience with the Tyco Videocam because it was something from my childhood. Originally it was something I got, but, being disinterested in black and white video, it fell to my younger brother, who used it to redub TV programs (because the mic pickup was reasonably excellent at close range and we figured out how to connect original source video with the Tyco cam's audio.) Some of it even managed to survive ~20 years later thanks to being recorded on VHS. I was happier later with a color camcorder and a then-fancypants PCI video capture card, but the Tyco videocam is still a nostalgic piece of my early life. Although I'm not 100% sure, I think this camera also was one of my first revelations regarding infrared light for exactly as this video shows... it works as almost an "invisible flashlight" in some ways. I think we were noticing our Furbys flashing their infrared forehead signals to each other along with remote controls.
I was given that camera the first Christmas it came out, and it helped me to realise my creative ideas at the time. Good stuff. Also, nice Lemmings reference. This video is really causing a nostalgia overload for me.
I had one of this in the mid nineties. Somewhere around 1994-1998 I would guess when I was around elementary school age. I doubt it was much more than $50-60 at the time. Both my friend whose house I went to after school until my parents were off work and I had one, so we used them a lot. A couple of things, your camera seems out of focus. It wasn't that soft if I remember correctly. The lightning was fairly easy to manage, as long as there was daylight. You just had to be in a room with big windows that let light in (obviously it liked daylight with the lack of IR filter). The rooms we usually filmed in were second story living rooms with two large single pane windows that let in a lot of light. We figured out the remote control trick pretty early, and used to use it as a laser gun kind of thing in the stuff we made. The biggest issue was editing anything up. If we bought a second VCR to wherever we could then use that to master a copy. Most of the time though it was film, replay, if needed reshot and replay, then next scene. You wouldn't be able to add anything in without redoing everything after it. Finally, the sound was MUCH better than I remember it being, but that might just be because we reused the VHS tapes so many times.
I used to have one of these as a kid and it retailed for roughly £50 here in the UK back in the day. We even bought an extension for it so we had free run of the entire house. It was insanely fun and still works now! :D
We got one of these from a garage sale back in the day. It was quite the fun toy for a bit. Eventually it got stashed or re-sold but I ended up using that long extension cord in my room to run from my PC to my stereo, carefully navigated around the perimeter of the room so it was tucked out of the way. Years later the cable stopped working and it was likely thrown away. Very convenient things to have, hah!
HAY 1:18 we had one of those VCRs, I haven't seen that thing in ages mostly because it died ages ago and I have yet to see anybody else do a video with one. That was the beginning of my VCR repair rabbit hole to the point where I figured out how to operate a VCR without the loading mechanism....... VCRs were expensive and prone to failure.
This was my first video camera back in 1996. I remember running around the house and filming my 6 year old shinanegans with a 20ft yellow cable tethered to the VCR. Good times.
My friends would bring this camera over when I was a kid. as I remember, we actually used my dad's old camcorder in which the tape mechanism was broken, so we recorded directly to a VCR with a high price camera.
Still have this camera laying around. I got one when I was a kid. Used to be my favorite toy back in the day. I still have a VHS tape with footage from my garden and dog. I Also used to put this camera on an RC car in combination with a UHF transmitter :) those were the days...
Wow what a walk down memory lane. I got one of these in '97 as a birthday present, and the price was definitely around the $100 AUD mark. The short cord was definitely a pain in the ass.
This was pretty darn cool! I remember the video cameras that you attached to a VCR that split apart and you carried part of it in a bag. What you have here was a cool toy for kids, and I bet they enjoyed it in DROVES! :-)
I had this camera! I bought it when i was 19 and loved it. It worked great as an infrared light detector. That's something I wish I had easy access to today with my VR work. If memory serves I got it around 45 bucks, thought it was a pretty good deal at the time.
This was my favorite toy as a kid. I had a cheap VCR & 13” TV in my bedroom, and my brother and I would spend hours doing stupid stuff in front of it, watching it back, and then taping over it. Occasionally if we had a holiday party I’d be allowed to take it down to the living room VCR and tape there as well. The nice thing about this camera is it’s so light and well-built that it’s pretty indestructible; that cheap tripod tipped over several times, and the camera was fine. So my brother and I deliberately made video gags out of finding new ways to knock the camera over while it was recording 😂
I can't tell you how much I appreciate you waiting until the end to point out that dead pixel. Really - thank you!
Yeah but some of us seen it early on and thought our phone screens had it 😂
I saw it but I managed to ignore it. The four noble truths are the existence of dukkha, the causes of dukkha, that there is a way to cease dukkha, and the way to cease dukkha. That way is the noble eightfold path. And with right concentration I did not stare at it.
Thanks Buddha Gotama!
+Tom Kay now go back to the beginning of the video and check the entire video again :D
Didn't make any difference for me, noticed it right away...
I was actually searching for a comment like yours to see if anyone else felt this grateful
This is the exact same camera with which every UFO footage is captured.
😂
No it can't be this camera this camera is too clear they could not hide the fishing line
same Jamie, the Fisher price camera is probably the camera used.
Don't forget about all the Sasquatches/bigfoots, chupacabras running around, space alien autopsies from 1947 and the Loch Ness monster too.
I agree the Fisher price camera is probably the camera used to produce the clearest of those U.F.O./ Sasquatches/bigfoots/ Chupacabras/ Loch Ness monster and any I did not list
Im sure that camera is literally just a cheap CCTV camera from the time in a plastic case. The fact is does so well with IR is telling of this too.
Also i have 2 of those long yellow cables this came with. Picked them up years and years ago and never knew what they came with. Now i know!
I remember catching myself accidently taking out some guys balls on this camera I loved that shit it was hilarious
Yep, that's exactly what it is
Ooooohhhh, I'm really glad that you decided to see how it would work under incandescent lighting! I could easily have imagined it being something that would be overlooked, and left a much worse overall impression had you not realized this fact! Thanks for the great video!
I think, being a history-of-tech buff, it'd be a bad move on his part if he didn't test it with incandescent lighting.
Chaos89P I do believe it could have been as well, just giving credit to the fact he thought of it and went out his way to showcase it! Let's people of whom may want to collect one definitively know, and makes for better overall content
I noticed back when we got one how well it lit up from the tv remote. I assumed the cheapest video sensor they could find was the kind used for video security cameras, which are supposed to be used with an infra red spotlight.
Yeah that was a good observation. I don't know if that would have occurred to me.
It was a common issue with older camcorders which were less light sensitive than higher end or more modern devices that using LED and fluorescent lamps produced bad image quality. That is because their light spectrum is typically not providing flat values on all frequencies, but instead they often give strong spikes at certain frequencies. Incandescent lightning normally has quite smooth range of light frequencies. Human eye won't properly distinguish such irregularity, although incandescent lightning might vaguely feel more "soft". I'm assuming this should still affect more modern cameras as well, but since the newer camera sensors tend to be otherwise better by average, this issue is less noticeable.
Also most CCD image sensors natively receive infrared light, however, consumer devices usually were actually added an IR filter to block out infrared, since it can cause certain image smearing, colour distortion etc. So technically when certain camcorder producers started to provide night vision gimmicks by IR sensor, it was not really about adding a new feature, but instead just releasing a handicap normally active. Obviously on that cheap Tyco camera they've saved on production costs and have not added the filter lens.
This was probably the best thing I had as a child. Brand new it came in the vicinity of 100 dollars. I think it was $120 Australian. Loads of fun
Edit: That cable was so annoying... But it was still awesome
I tried to scratch that dead pixel off of my phone screen
same here, noticed it justt before he mentioned it, scared the shit out of me
My phone has such a high resolution I doubt a single pixel would even be visible
+theRPGmaster Um... one pixel from that camera is definitely going to be multiple pixels on your phone.
Except the dead pixel is on the camera, upscaled to your screen, so the dead "pixel" would actually be multiple pixels.
lol
Wow I have that same exact camera I got it for Christmas 1996 from toys "R" Us in Columbia, MO I recorded a lot of videos with it. I actually did go to RadioShack and get a longer cable for it so I could go all over our house! It did cost around $50 I still have it to this day with the original box and all the paperwork! Great video thank you so much for making it!
What's interesting about this VHS connected camcorder is that back in the 80's, my uncle actually had a video camera that didn't have its own tape mechanism inside of it. It connected to an external, battery powered VHS recorder that he carried in a bag over his shoulder. If a kid had found that recorder, this would be a complete portable recording solution.
Kazriko Redclaw that's why the camcorder is called so, because it was both a camera and a recorder. before the camcorder you had to have a camera and a recorder.
I have stashed away a portable VHS recorder (sadly doesn't work right any more) from the 80s which you can plug cameras into (including this tyco I'm sure), I also have a complete Sony Betamax SL-F1UB kit with the recorder, tuner-timer unit, and over-the-shoulder camcorder, and believe me, I'm GLAD that camcorders were created and shrank down so much over the years, that kit is hard on your shoulders and arms!! :S
@Nukleon I didn't know that. I don't think I've ever seen a stand along VHS recorder that wasn't a VCR like you'd play movies on. I've seen standalone cameras, but those where studio equipment
I haven't seen one in person, but I have an old VHS book (from 1986 or so) that mentioned these. The tuner and VHS recorder would be separate units, and the recorder part was portable and could be connected to a camera and then would “dock” into the tuner unit to function like an ordinary home VCR.
TravisTev That's how they work.
been waiting fir the frequency of videos to get this good. love how many videos there are
I was lucky enough to get one of these for Christmas, and I seem to remember it being around £100 (GBP) from our town's Co-Op department store. Our VCR at the time had a "title" function that allowed you to display (and therefore, record) text characters on the screen, presumably to help you identify what's on each tape. Although painstaking, I used this to generate name straps and title cards for all the homemade "TV shows" I filmed in our front room! 😄
Oh wow, you did one of these! This was my first ever camera. I remember learning the hard way that the "pause" function on a VCR isn't precise enough to make stop-motion videos with your Transformers toys!
Eventually I ended up taking the thing apart and stuffing the guts into a "modified" tissue box to make a spy camera. A *totally* inconspicuous spy camera with a bright yellow cord trailing out the back...
This brought back some great memories that me and my sibling used to have, making our own "tv shows" and "mini films" we used to have 2 vhs tapes to our name at one point and would just continually record over them. If we had spent alot of time on something we might even show it to our parents after dinner and have a "movie night" with it. Those were some great times!
I remember the commercial for that from when I was seven years old! It looked neat, but I didn't need it because my dad would let me borrow his old VHS-C camcorder from time to time (yes, I was careful with it.) And it also shot in color and recorded onto its own storage media, compared to TYCO's VideoCam.
This is from near the end of TYCO's run. Their stuff in the mid-90s was a far cry from in the 70s and 80s, when they were producing slot cars and model trains!
microphone quality on that thing is way better than many modern recording devices being posted up to youtube.
Well, you do also have to keep in mind that in my studio room, all of the ceiling and 3 walls are covered with sound-deadening foam.
For those too young to remember very early home video cameras attached to a battery-powered VHS machine that you slung over your shoulder. If you could have mated one of those [perhaps a garage sale find in 96?] with the Tyco, a kid would be good to go!
I had an old Beta "over the shoulder" rig like that. After about an hour, everything hurt from lugging that 40lb mass of electronics around! I finally got smart and got a ruckpack and stuffed it all in there. No lighter, but easier on my shoulders. The 45 minute battery (the size of a house brick) actually got drained a few times after that!
My grandpa had one of those. I remember we recorded a couple videos with it back when I was a kid.
TYCo also made model trains, up until 1993.
Fascinating. That's far better than I expected it to be.
You could use it as a security camera
I really wouldn't rely on that soft picture for security. Even my standard definition infrared security camera on one of the corners on my home, has a far sharper resolution.
Compared to other security cameras of the time, the quality isn't bad. A shame about the brightness though. I wonder how much an outdoor infrared floodlight would have been at the time this was released?
Apparently they are still using this camera for security cameras..
lol, I just read your comment after commenting that it might be a security camera fired inside a video camera housing . lol
That's essentially what's inside the thing - a B&W CCD board camera.
I had one of these when I was young. My father was a tv technician and got a hold of one of these. I have no clue where the camera is now today but I have both those yellow cables still to this day. I used to use them for my headphones from my amp before the days of mp3 players and smart phones.
If you mount a strong infrared light to it; it might be a half decent night camera...
Thank you for waiting until the end to point out that pixel. Would've driven me crazy.
Keep making cool stuff like this!
The bad pixel made my heart jump when I noticed it..
David that was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed making the video as much as we enjoyed watching. Cheers!
I find it somewhat amusing (and ironic) that a 90's camcorder for children has a clearer sounding microphone than most laptops today.
I don't think laptop mics are bad, the audio is just poorly compressed
I had this exact camera as a kid! I have been trying to remember what kind of camera it was for years. Thanks for covering this and bringing back a bunch of great/hilarious memories.
I remember seeing the commercial for this thing back in the day, an laughing my ass off when the kid plugged it into his VCR, I guess because my family by that point had already had a VHS Camcorder for about 8 or 9 years.
Lemmings SFX at the beginning! Loooove it!
i can customise a backpack with a car battery and use that one to take vids and claim that im a ufo and paranormal expert.
for Paranormal stuff, there's always the handycams with their awful nightshot....
Wow, that was a very interesting found on that infrared binary via interlaced video from the camera! Just another adventure with The 8-Bit Guy, awesome as always, sir!
Now I can tell is someone is trying to stalk me with an active IR scope so long as I stay near my VCR.
i never thought of infrared stuff for the camera sensor issue... great tutorial! very informative and i like the way each time when you dig out old components out of old devices you explain the mechanism how it works
You have the power to make even a shitty toy video camera interesting :D
We had that particular camera including the yellow cable. As a 12 and 8 year old (brother and me), boy did we have fun with it. Now we could anchor our own news and record our grandparents, which never believed we recorded the stuff. Brings back good memories.
Did I just hear Lemmings at 0:33? Or am I going mad?
You did.. it's part of the song by izioq.
Nope was a "lets go"
Yeah, the "Let's Go!" was what the little guys shouted at the start of each stage... quickly followed by "Oh No!" as I nuked them ;)
Got one of these for my birthday as a kid, was so cool back then. Can’t tell you how many hours of fun I had with it.
I got mine for Christmas in 1997, and I still have it. I'm pretty sure the logo of the font was different. Mine is missing the battery door so I can't tell for sure. I used to use it mostly on AC power (yes, another cord) because I seem to remember it eating through batteries pretty quickly. It was definitely $100 at that time -- I remember it saying so in the catalogs at the time and it was a really big deal when I got it because it was such a costly item.
Try hooking the camera up to a PC (line input 3.5mm) and record the signal as PCM audio
I got very excited when I saw this review! This camera was my childhood. I have VHS tapes upon VHS tapes of footage I am slowly converting. You could get extension cords for the yellow cable up to a certain footage, maybe 100 feet. I had this thing all over the house and backyard with those. You had to get creative in movies when the person in the scene had to hit record and then sprint across the house to get in the shot haha. Cuts were easy because you could just rewind back to where you wanted the next scene to start. I believe my parents paid $100 right near release. It was my favorite gift of my childhood!
The first video I watched that featured a Tyco Video Camera was Druaga1 trying to put in an SSD into it.
xtremeguy2256 finally someone who noticed
every once in a while I stubble upon a great channel. I found your channel through one of your restoration videos. i have since watched every video both on this channel and your 8 bit keys channel. I had zero interest in these things beforehand, but after your videos Id like to get my hands on some of these things. thank you!
the frame rate honestly isn't bad. i was expecting it to be like 8fps
Frame rate is given by the recording format. Being from a VHS tape, it would have the frame rate from the videotape or the video capture device.
3:16 "See whatcha think of THAT!" LOVE IT HAHAHA. That's your new catchphrase 8-Bit Guy. You should play that little bit after each video.
Druaga1 reviewed this very camera.
Hello!, and welcome to another episode of the Duraga1!
Funny thing is, I think Druaga1 watches 8-Bit Guy!
yes, he did
I know he watches Techmoan as both 8-Bit Guy and Drugga1 are listed in the patrons at the end of his vids.
well said *clapps
I had one of these as a kid. I purchased it with my savings at the time and it was £29.99 GBP at the time. But I got a second hand tripod and filmed outside with it and produced my own episodes of Dr.Who. I seem to remember hooking up a jack-to-jack cable to a Walkman at the time and playing it back to my VCR later on. I'd love to see you try it out. I also remember filming the live output on the TV to get the infinite tunnel effect from Dr.Who opening sequence. What a blast from the past. Thanks for showing this.. so much Nostalgia.
I bet that the camera optics are out of focus.
I think so, too. When I used my camera back in 1999, it produced slightly sharper images, although the picture edges were as out of focus as in the video.
Chewing Salad All cheap lenses even today are softer at the edges, especially at big apertures.
The lens of this videocamera has a very small aperture for a reason. A smaller aperture gives bigger depth of field. So everything is in focus and there is not need for focus ring and extra cost. A smaller aperture helps the lens to be a sharp as possible with less chromatic aberration and vignetting (less need for expensive optics).
The drawback of a small aperture is that less amount of light is passing to the film or the image sensor.
Cheap Kodak photographic film cameras didn't have focus ring due to their fixed small aperture. To compensate the problem of poor indoor lighting, flash cubes where used. In the case of cameras the flash isn't a solution.
All modern image sensors have low pass infrared fIlter. The human eye have infrared and ultraviolet filter(as long as you don't have a cataract surgery). For lowering the cost the Tyco camera manufacturer didn't installed a low pass filter. Actually it took advantage of that.
Home video cameras even during late 90's were expensive equipments. The video recording mechanism inside the video camera was unavoidably complex, very small and expensive.
The Tyco camera has as few features and components as possible. I doubt if it's lens has more than the typical three elements. Probably just one meniscus element. Even that element after some drops must have been moved slightly and it is out of focus.
The quality of optics is an issue that even today ordinary consumers ignore. Cheap digital cameras nowadays can correct issues of cheaper optics digitally from inside. For example geometric distortion, vignetting, contrast, sharpness, chromatic aberration are typically digitally corrected inside the smartphones and compact cameras. This helps manufacturers to avoid more expensive lenses and higher cost.
Of course these digital corrections are rarely as good as those with a computer. That's why recently many smartphones and compacts cameras support raw photo files which can be processed with programs like Lightroom.
One common problem with the Fisher-Price Pixel Vision camera is an optical low pass filter between the lens and sensor would get discolored over the years and considerably degrade the image. The fix was simply to remove that square piece and it would brighten up the image considerably.
I wonder if there's an equivalent thing going on with the Tyco cam. And also, the lens might be manually adjustable; I know from working with CCD board cameras of similar vintage that many of these had lenses that manually focus.
Or the board camera might have slightly moved its position relative to the lens, perhaps due to warping of the plastic body of the camera.
Wow - this takes me back down memory lane!
Back in 1999/2000 I bought 15 of these, end of line from a south London toy store for £10 ($12) each and re-sold them mostly to work colleagues (in the BBC!).
I still have the stand and long yellow cable for the one I kept for myself. One thing you COULD do if you pulled it apart was refocus it slightly - you could get a sharper image because just about every one I tried was ever so slightly out of focus, though you had to break the glued seal for the actual camera lens to do this, but once done, the re-focusing was easy.
The camera itself was tiny compared to the plastic housing that made it look more like a camcorder and as you have correctly surmised, it was pretty much an infra red camera being very sensitive to IR and terrible at visible light - I even created an infra red lamp out of 12 IR LEDs and mounted it in my attic, pointing at a bird's next there to be able to watch the nest on my TV when the attic itself was otherwise in total darkness!
The IR sensitivity became obvious when pointing at some things - my Mission 70 loudspeakers for my HiFi were jet black in normal light, yet when using this camera they appeared light grey and you could see through the black fabric cover and see the speakers themselves. Lighting, even using the early "low energy" light bulbs (the twisted florescent type) was awful compared to incandescent bulbs and, although I haven't tried it out for a very long time now, I'm not surprised at your results with LED bulbs.
A colleague had made an exceptionally bright (and dangerous) IR lamp using one of those old "million candle power" large flashlights and placing an industrial IR filter in front of its lens which absorbed 99% of visible light letting through only IR - this camera was AWESOME to use at night for recording wildlife, using this lamp (though the lamp itself did overheat and started melting after a minute or two's use!!)
The version I had of the camera was the 50Hz UK/European version and once taken completely apart, the minimal circuit board made no mention of Tyco - however I do remember it did have the words "Shoot the moon" written on it.
One other thing I remember doing with it was mounting the small internal camera (minus the plastic faux camcorder housing in your video) on my car's bumper with gaffer tape (the UK equivalent to duct tape) and took a full sized VHS recorder in the car, powered by a computer UPS and recorded my 40 minute journey from work to home along London's orbital M25 motorway! That could be done very easily these days of course with a GoPro but remember, this was back in 1999!
Apart from being 50 frames per second for the European market, the only other difference between the ones I bought to the one you show here is that the ones I bought didn't come with the carry case.
I kinda wish I had been filming everything when I was a kid. 90's vlogger!
I was surprised at the microphone quality. It was really not terrible. I'm always interested in stuff from 1996 specifically since it was the year I was born.
I was thinking about something that could be done with this camera. With a tiny computer like a raspberry pi, or something a bit more powerful, and a USB video capture dongle, it should be possible to build a cheap and compact digital recorder for that camera. Even better, add a LCD screen and now you have a complete digital camcorder.
Nostalgia! I had one of these as a kid, best Christmas present I ever received! Wish I still had some of the videos I made. When I got older I got curious and opened it up. It’s mostly an empty box, circuit board with the camera in the lens and cables leading to the outputs / battery!
I founded the Dead Pixel :D
but it was confusing because my monitor has 2 dead pixels
@The 8-Bit Guy you are the only channel that i know i'm going to like the video of every upload. can't wait tell the next one.
Only old viewers will know THIS laptop 3:24
I do!
No, I mean how the laptop is a custom black/white color scheme
PCFanatic Macbook secrets?
+PCFanatic I wonder why he still uses that laptop...
@@Connie_TinuityError because it still works? Sometimes age doesn't matter... And it looks cool with that color scheme
Oh man, I remember having one of these cameras as a kid and making all sorts of films on it, I remember very fondly animating my legos with it using a time-lapse vcr? or something like that (averaged about 12fps). Ours came with the big, bright yellow 30ish foot cable that would run all through the house and annoy everyone.
Wow! This film has exactly 10.00 minutes :) It's so... Perfect! And of course nice video ;)
If he would make it 1 second longer he could insert another ad, weird
No, it was 9:59 minutes
Great review of the Tyco video cam...
I was one of those lucky children that had one of these for Christmas in 1996, I absolutely loved it! I believe it sold in the UK for around £50! Great memories! 👍🏼
Chinese subtitles have been uploaded.And that remote control looks like a lightsaber :)
I love the discussion about the infrared light, I probably never would have thought of that! Very interesting!
I got one of these for my birthday or Christmas in '96 or '97. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw this video. Now I want to know what happened to it and the VHS tapes I recorded to. Probably best that they're gone. I'm sure I'd be mortified by my 12 year old nerdy self on the tapes. :)
I had one too... wonder where it went. lol.
I recently captured footage off my PXL when I was in grade 3. I had no idea I talked so much, and with such eloquence and insight.
Barely any video made it through though, I think there's 3-4 seconds of me on there out of the 3 tapes I pulled content from.
Great video! My family could not afford a regular camcorder. I did get this Tyco Video Camera one Christmas and loved it. I have stacks of VHS tapes with my silly antics. I too tried to do Lego Animation by painstakingly pausing record for every frame. My cousins and friends tried to make a movie. We used the yellow extension cord outside. The videos help me revisit my childhood. :)
TEARDOWN! :D
I used to have one of these as a kid. I remember attaching mine to a transmitter strapping it to my RC car and driving it around the house and yard. Hours of fun.
You know, for £50 quid this is decent, especially when camcorders cost £800.
Agreed. I'd be curious how much it would have cost to make one that could record in color
Got mine in 1997 at Toys R Us. Caused me a great deal of frustration. I was so bummed it wasn’t wireless and was in black and white.
why am I watching a review for a childs camera that is older then me
Callum Leigh Montgomery Get off my lawn.
And that's how you film flashback scenes of traumatic events. It even has the blurry edges.
Wait what, I'm the first viewer? Oh wow!
Hehe. Did you get a price? ^_^
(I actually started watching it right as it was published, but I couldn't finish it because the scaffolding tower wouldn't build itself. I'm filming an airshow on Sunday and preparations starts today)
Do the birthday presents I got today count? :P
Oh and nice! You seem like an all-around talent :D
Oh my.. is it your birthday today?! :O Congratulations!
Did you get my cassette already? If not, maybe I should arrange a little late birthday present... ;)
I never actually sent you my address so how should I get it? :D Except you're the NSA and somehow found it ;D
EpicLPer PM me and I'll send you one :)
I had one of those when I was a kid. Seeing that brought back a lot of fun memories, thanks for sharing!
this is bullshit. 90s kids we get Tyco camera and today's kids get Gopro.
Or an iPhone which can take the video, play the video share the video and watch porn and order pizza. We had a tyco camera and JC Penny flyers.
I had this camera when I was younger and filmed my own TV news show. Haha it was great. It featured news, weather, and sports. I had made advertisements and cards to display to the camera to show various captions. This camera for the time was very good for kids. What a time to be a kid!
drunk test
read more
wel done i fell for it (again) and i am not even alowed to drink alcohol
MrSkyl1ne I'm not drunk, just stupid...
Zach Embee Me Too
im on a touchscreen laptop..
I didn't fell for it.
And I can promise that I never will when this "joke" is made in English.
My UA-cam never say "read more"
Conclusion: English speakers are dumber
I have a personal experience with the Tyco Videocam because it was something from my childhood. Originally it was something I got, but, being disinterested in black and white video, it fell to my younger brother, who used it to redub TV programs (because the mic pickup was reasonably excellent at close range and we figured out how to connect original source video with the Tyco cam's audio.) Some of it even managed to survive ~20 years later thanks to being recorded on VHS. I was happier later with a color camcorder and a then-fancypants PCI video capture card, but the Tyco videocam is still a nostalgic piece of my early life.
Although I'm not 100% sure, I think this camera also was one of my first revelations regarding infrared light for exactly as this video shows... it works as almost an "invisible flashlight" in some ways. I think we were noticing our Furbys flashing their infrared forehead signals to each other along with remote controls.
Please upload in 1080P, thanks!
Diogo Why? because 1080 is better that's why.. higher resolution = higher detail.
northhankspin
so you can see the bad quality in better quality? :v
The 8-bit guy is recording in 720p because he's edditing it on an old Mac. It can't handle 1080p, so he doesn't see any reason to upgrade to 1080p.
he has the obligation to upload in good quality, this is is job ffs
Diogo 720p quality is fine. Anyways, why would you need 1080p for a video mostly containing footage that’s not even close to hd
I was given that camera the first Christmas it came out, and it helped me to realise my creative ideas at the time. Good stuff.
Also, nice Lemmings reference. This video is really causing a nostalgia overload for me.
From the company that brought you epic train and slot car action!
I had one of this in the mid nineties. Somewhere around 1994-1998 I would guess when I was around elementary school age.
I doubt it was much more than $50-60 at the time. Both my friend whose house I went to after school until my parents were off work and I had one, so we used them a lot.
A couple of things, your camera seems out of focus. It wasn't that soft if I remember correctly.
The lightning was fairly easy to manage, as long as there was daylight. You just had to be in a room with big windows that let light in (obviously it liked daylight with the lack of IR filter). The rooms we usually filmed in were second story living rooms with two large single pane windows that let in a lot of light.
We figured out the remote control trick pretty early, and used to use it as a laser gun kind of thing in the stuff we made.
The biggest issue was editing anything up. If we bought a second VCR to wherever we could then use that to master a copy. Most of the time though it was film, replay, if needed reshot and replay, then next scene. You wouldn't be able to add anything in without redoing everything after it. Finally, the sound was MUCH better than I remember it being, but that might just be because we reused the VHS tapes so many times.
I had this as a kid and loved it! I had multiple extension cords that worked with it and was able to film all around the house.
If I remember correctly it was around $200. My parents told me no.
I used to have one of these as a kid and it retailed for roughly £50 here in the UK back in the day. We even bought an extension for it so we had free run of the entire house. It was insanely fun and still works now! :D
We got one of these from a garage sale back in the day. It was quite the fun toy for a bit. Eventually it got stashed or re-sold but I ended up using that long extension cord in my room to run from my PC to my stereo, carefully navigated around the perimeter of the room so it was tucked out of the way. Years later the cable stopped working and it was likely thrown away. Very convenient things to have, hah!
Straight to the point as usual, Thank you Mr. 8-Bit Guy :)
This is the most extensive review I've ever seen of anything.
The sensitivity to infared and playing around the remote and the lighting is very interesting. I enjoyed the video. Thank you.
After two years of watching this channel, you're finally playing with something I actually owned as kid!
These Videos are Great to play in the background while doing tasks like coding. Keep Up the Work!
i must admit i find this channel addictive ... new sub...
HAY 1:18 we had one of those VCRs, I haven't seen that thing in ages mostly because it died ages ago and I have yet to see anybody else do a video with one. That was the beginning of my VCR repair rabbit hole to the point where I figured out how to operate a VCR without the loading mechanism....... VCRs were expensive and prone to failure.
Oh my, a trip down memory lane. I wish I still had mine. I loved pointing my remote control at it and pretending it was a laser gun. Great video!
This one really takes me back. I had this thing. I loved it, though. Thank god all the tapes have long since gone missing or been written over!
This was my first video camera back in 1996. I remember running around the house and filming my 6 year old shinanegans with a 20ft yellow cable tethered to the VCR. Good times.
Dang, I never would've figured that stuff about the IR light, this guy has to be some kind of genius
My friends would bring this camera over when I was a kid. as I remember, we actually used my dad's old camcorder in which the tape mechanism was broken, so we recorded directly to a VCR with a high price camera.
Still have this camera laying around. I got one when I was a kid. Used to be my favorite toy back in the day. I still have a VHS tape with footage from my garden and dog. I Also used to put this camera on an RC car in combination with a UHF transmitter :) those were the days...
Wow what a walk down memory lane. I got one of these in '97 as a birthday present, and the price was definitely around the $100 AUD mark. The short cord was definitely a pain in the ass.
This was pretty darn cool! I remember the video cameras that you attached to a VCR that split apart and you carried part of it in a bag. What you have here was a cool toy for kids, and I bet they enjoyed it in DROVES! :-)
I had this camera! I bought it when i was 19 and loved it. It worked great as an infrared light detector. That's something I wish I had easy access to today with my VR work.
If memory serves I got it around 45 bucks, thought it was a pretty good deal at the time.
Its episodes like this that I keep coming around. it's not the tech persay it's how you review it. keep it up.
Nice catch on the IR overexposure! Thanks for the video.
Cool video! The use of a UV sensitive CCD in the time of incandescence is really clever.
This was my favorite toy as a kid. I had a cheap VCR & 13” TV in my bedroom, and my brother and I would spend hours doing stupid stuff in front of it, watching it back, and then taping over it. Occasionally if we had a holiday party I’d be allowed to take it down to the living room VCR and tape there as well. The nice thing about this camera is it’s so light and well-built that it’s pretty indestructible; that cheap tripod tipped over several times, and the camera was fine. So my brother and I deliberately made video gags out of finding new ways to knock the camera over while it was recording 😂
such kudos for investigating the infrared sensitivity. really interesting.
This was really interesting, especially the part where you mentioned about the infrared signals that the camera can apparently pick up.