This is an ideal camera for capturing the foggy, detail free scenes of Bigfoot, UFO's or lake monsters. In fact, I believe this video standard is mandatory.
I was going to say that it seems like a perfect cam for making a Found Footage style movie. Just need to set the time period for late 90s and up through much of the 00s (especially if using the DSR-50 for moments that need better quality while keeping it looking old). But your idea is like perfect. Would give more recording time than say claiming it was recorded on an old camera phone or something.
Again an excellent video! These cameras are downright fascinating for the time, despite the limitations, and I’m glad the EG1 has now been covered so thoroughly. On a related note, the M2 was sold as the MP-EG10W once it launched in the US! I've only seen it referred to as the M2 in certain marketing and press coverage hyping up the product.
18:55 honestly the Oneplus > MPEG encoded video just looks like an early UA-cam video, whereas the MP-EG1 looks like a camera made to capture sasquatch footage
Addendum and corrections: • "It doesn't look that bad to me" - This is actually my fault. The biggest problem with the raw video out of this device is the egregious, sharp-edged macroblocks, which are just as visible on its direct composite output as they are on a PC. However, I converted all the test clips to MP4 before including them in this video, and didn't think to compare them side by side. Transcoding to MP4 *at 352x240* causes a significant change in the texture of the image, eliminating the blocking artifacts, so I'm realizing now that it took a lot of punch out of the quality comparisons. This can be avoided by first upscaling to HD res before reencoding as MP4, demonstrated here: gekk.info/videos/mpupscale.png I will be releasing a followup to this video, because I got the second model in the series, and it answers a lot of the questions I had. I will reencode the clips correctly for that one. For the time being, you can download some of the raw footage here: gekk.info/videos/mpegcam/mpeg1/ • "This isn't that bad if you know what video at the time was like!" - I do. I was there when MPEG was king, I lived through the Realmedia era as well. It sucked, but it didn't suck this much. When I downloaded a video in 1998 that looked like this, I deleted it. • The reason I say the converted cellphone video "looks almost like a good quality VHS rip" is because at the time, I was referring to a clip I'd made that DID look that good - and then I realized it contained a large area of smooth tones that was probably giving the bitrate a break. I recorded and converted a new clip that was more realistic, which you see in the video. That one definitely shows the hallmarks of heavy compression, but I just couldn't reshoot the dialogue to soften my praise. • I forgot to point out the white speckles and streaks that show up in the MPEG footage. I don't know that much about video compression but I've never seen anything like this, and all I can guess is that the compressor is outright buggy and occasionally produces invalid encoding. • The 16GB CF card you see in the video *was not* the one I tested with. I used a 256MB WD Silicondrive, which are designed to be highly compatible. The camera recognized it, acknowledged it had the free space, but refused to go to video mode, while other modes worked. My hypothesis is that Hitachi's devs had no time to make the firmware tolerant of inconsistent user-provided drives, so they coded it to refuse to go to video mode unless it detects the precise model number of the HDD they were shipping, probably the only one they had a chance to test against. Hitachi's documentation on the later M2 model implies that it is far more tolerant of different media. It shipped with a 16MB flash drive and could be used with both the 260MB and a 1GB drive they provided, and that makes me think they had implemented better latency testing and compensation. Again, something that I'm positive would have been in the first model if it had not been rushed to market.
27:12 - The Video Toaster Flyer on the Amiga used a similar A/B video deck switching metaphor. You would pare down your clips into “croutons” and arrange them in order in a Program (olde timey for Output) window and drop transition croutons between them. There was no timeline at all until third-party devs wrote one. Hell, the hardware itself followed that metaphor - you had “A” and “B” video drives, and a third for audio.
@@CantankerousDave To be fair, the Toaster Flyer was one of the first NLEs ever made. There was no template on how the interface should work. NewTek also had to deal with the limitations of storage I/O at the time, and the use of the Video Toaster card itself for generating effects. The Amiga was just a glorified controller/interface for the whole mess. The magic was all done on the Flyer card (SCSI I/O and video codecs) and the VT4000 card (generating transition effects and graphics).
This looks like the precursor to those "Disposable Camcorders" they sold at CVS back in 2005 that had like 2 hours of storage and they would rip it off for you onto a DVD when you were done. They weren't actually disposable, they would just wipe them and repackage them for the next customer. They were super hackable because the product was made by a 3rd party that had all the drivers and docs for it online, you could just grab a "Disposable Camcorder (maybe it was called a One Time Use Camcorder?)" for $20, wire up the pinout to serial using an old Palm Pilot cable and rip the recordings off it as you pleased. You got a $200 camera for a 10th of the price. Then the "Flip Video" came out which was basically the same camera but reusable with a USB port on it.
Oh I remember taking summer money to buy one of those to hack up. I remember it being stupid easy to hack. I bet I still have it in a bin haha! Thanks for reminding me of this!
love the crunchy mpeg compression on display here. as someone who regularly watches video at low bitrates because of crappy internet my brain is shockingly adept at subconsciously decompressing the artifacts into information and it takes real effort to really examine the clips and notice the macroblocking and DCT artifacting for what they are
@@SeanBZA I know, it's just a joke on AI upscaling and how OP mentally does kinda that... (so not _artificial_ intelligence) On another note, Waifu2x upscaling for anime-style drawings is weirdly functional. It's incredibly impressive, it sure doesn't restore lost detail but upscaling lines to be properly in place happens like magic.
@@Kalvinjj Yes but line art and cartoon video is very much a good compression, large swathes of same colour, and a simpler colour palette in use as well, so you can upscale much easier there, just have to do edge detection, and remove jagged edges, and fill in with the surrounding colours.
This is exactly the reason why MPEG can do lossy compression. Because it throws away parts that our brain can potentially reconstruct. That's... The whole point.
21:23 Come for the half-hour deep dive into an obscure AV device, stay for the one-second sight gag of text added to the wall in post changing angles and sliding out of frame. Your attention to production is masterful.
26:08 "Ability to modify the date and time" "I feel that its only possible use would be fraud" There is actually a very practical use for that feature when travelling between timezones. It takes just one slip forgetting to change the timezone while in transit, and then the time and sometimes even dates are screwed up. Had to change exif data on a few occasions because of that.
Love the effort and research put into this video, including the hassle of bringing a DVCAM recorder to see its full picture quality and using 90's era computers to demonstrate the features, even to the point of finding a copy of Adobe Premiere 1.0! Still find it amazing that this was the great grandfather of the Flip cams that were so popular in early 2008-2012 UA-cam before Google sold out.
Haha, thank you! It's actually Premiere 5 - they had several releases on windows 3 that I want to make a video about someday! I thought about making the connection to the Flip camera (one of the most interesting video cameras in history, sorta) but felt like a lot of people might actually not remember it. You can definitely see that it was on the road there however!
I really hope your channel pops off. I found you a few days ago and can't stop watching your videos. I like that your direct, yet can crack a joke at the right time to keep things interesting. Another interesting thing I notice is that you have a tendency to use really defined words. "Littlerly no one used these" "everyone used this" "I have absolutely no idea how this works". Its a nice touch and I like your style. Looking forward to the next episode!
I’ve been here since sub 100 subscribers. CRD is going to make it to over a million before we all know it, and I’m here for that too! Support his Patreon if you guys can. This content is only uploaded by a select few at this high of a Caliber and I’d love to be part of and foster an ever growing and supportive community. Thanks CRD and fans! Ps check out the side channel for the Sunday game streams, pure relaxation and bliss with a bit of perfect dry wit and snappy humor sprinkled in the commentary. What more could one person need?
Hitachi seems to be a name that loves fecal references. In French we often refer to the model Hitachi Yetzu, because Hitachi Yetzu sounds exactly like "il t'a chié dessus" (he shat on you).
There's something about that video quality, it looks like those videos that you would get in a email attachment in the early 00s, videos where incredibly fake shit always happened, it's really strange. Anyway, I wasn't aware of the existence of this device and as always it was a fantastic video!
Oh man great video. That state of the art hardware encoder got a beating from you. There just was no way to make it better at the time and fit it in one chip at reasonable power consumption. A marvel they did what they did at all.
well, you know, once I get an M2 I'll be able to determine if that's really true - I strongly suspect it actually COULD do better, but hitachi's engineers weren't given the time they needed to fully test and calibrate it. We'll see!
I love learning about products that were simultaneously at the absolute razor's edge, but also obsolete at launch. "Now, you can do this!" "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's like a motorized unicycle...it's unique, but hardly useful.
I mean yeah it isn't bad for 1997 kinda. The thing is things like this WERE released and really they shouldn't have been. I remember when the bottom end of things looked like this back then and the problem was it was a waste of money. To get usable digital video back then you had to spend multiple thousand dollars and to get GOOD DV you were spending 5 digits and the first number wasn't a 1. These things should not have existed. 3-4 years later you could buy this quality as a kids toy camera. 2007 the only thing that looked this way WAS toy cameras and flip phones! Even in 1997 this was a waste of money at any price point.
the conpression going haywire on plantlife is something that Tom Scott made a video about i dont renember the whole video, but the gist of it is that moving green objects reak havoc on digital compression to this very day (our eyes for example have more green than other color receptors so we dont have that problem)
Yeah I was pretty unfair to it but, like I said, a camcorder that can't handle seeing a tree without trashing the entire image is functionally useless haha.
The first all-digital tapeless video camera was a professional camcorder by Ikegami. They stored video on hard disk drive "EditPaks" and I remember seeing it at the NAB show in 1995. Super rare, super high quality SD and super expensive but incredibly good for instant ingest of digital video for TV news stations. Way ahead of its time and file based video recording didn't really catch on for another ten years until Sony XDCAM professional disc and Panasonic DVCPRO on memory cards. Hitachi also tried out a professional hard drive pack recorder about the same time as this MPEG1 recorder but the first "proper" file based video recording was 25 Megabits/sec DV recording to hard drives and that sort of happened around 1999-2000.
"Consumer electronics were madlads" Press e to pay respects for RCA, your vinyl video disc was a cool thing if only it was something other than that :-) Also anyone who presses f is invited to the wake.
honestly, based on the body style, the swivelling head and the stand style, this thing feels less like a camcorder camera, more like a portable audiorecorder that can shoot scratch video at the same time. you can handheld get a scratch video and audio clip, or a tabletop interview recording, or selfrecorded scratch video and audio notes. it feels like something a very well paid and tech savvy journalist might have used in their toolkit.
That foldout viewer shade was standard on "small size" (4x6cm etc.) still cameras and were also an option on some high end 35mm SLR cameras. Shape is incredibly close to a normal still camera turned 90° . Angled lens swivel makes me think there's a diagonally mounted camera tube inside and the rotating just moves the lens and a mirror. As for the stand, I'm surprised the main housing doesn't have the standard screw hole, that would fit all sizes of camera or microphone stands at least since the 1950s. I remember one that was smaller than this camera and could be attached to any table, chair or dead tree available.
You’re videos are so insanely detailed and well done. You have a new subscriber. I hope one day your channel blows up like clints did. Well done, and well deserved!
I'm so glad I found this channel about a year ago. Nice growth and congrats on your success and yes I'm looking forward to the next one. Also commenting to feed the algorithm.
I wonder if the original owner bought a replacement battery more recently than 1997. When this item came out, I had a subscription to Videomaker, and I vaguely remember an article or advertisement about a hard drive based camcorder. Maybe this was it. With the results you got, it is no surprise that tape formats (Hi8, SVHS, and the new-at-the-time MiniDV) were still the preferred method of acquisition for video enthusiests. Regardless, nice find of a rare piece of gear, and you got the box! Great vid!
I had considered that, but it's an official Hitachi battery, and I feel like nobody could have been sufficiently excited about this thing to buy new packs while Hitachi was still making them. The only way I can imagine it happening is if it sat in a box for 12 years, then someone dug it out, went "huh, i wonder if this was any good" and bought third party ones. Thanks for watching!!
New visitor; 10:15 -- using the actual view through the camera + recorded vid to point out the information on the screen amused me to no end. That's clever!
I appreciate the detail of using real time footage to show the ui of the viewfinder with your hands! Caught me off guard and had to rewind a bit to pay attention to what you were saying lol
Your videos are great! I never knew this existed and you going over this is important to preserve history, but also, it's just so cool seeing how these things worked. In terms of quality of the camera reasoning, I think you nailed it. Part of the reason is the encode methods for sure, but also another reason which you also mentioned, is lower resolution ADCs. With an ADC, you want the best possible noiseless signal before going into your quantizer. But even if you have a perfect signal you are limited by something called dynamic range. In simple words, dynamic range is just the max and min amplitude that your ADC can interpret and is expressed as the maximum signal to noise ratio. With something like video, you want the most dynamic range you can possibly get. Once this range is exceeded, oversaturation of lighter colors and dulling out darker ones making then look like a blob is what could happen. Dynamic range is a limit of the resolution of your ADC. An 8-bit ADC has ~49.93 dB and a 32-bit ADC has ~194.435 dB. Basically it boils down to this -> More resolution = More dynamic range. More bits, more fun! In terms of this camera, yeah it got the worst of both worlds. Cost and power savings yielded a choice for less processing power with a custom IC and once again cost, board space, and power budgets probably limited ADC/DAC choices and you end up with the worst of both worlds 🤣 less video information retention after encode and awful dynamic range so terrible adaptability to different lighting in scenes. Yikes. Awesome video! Loved it!
PCMCIA was basically a miniaturized version of the 16-bit ISA bus. It was popular for storage because in the end, IDE was also that same ISA bus thrown on a cable, with the controller card being inside the drive. So by more dumb luck than wisdom, probably, PCMCIA is (almost) pin compatible with IDE and with an adapter it can take CompactFlash (which in itself is a mini version of PCMCIA/IDE). Evidence that PCMCIA and IDE are directly compatible is the fact that you can plug a CompactFlash card directly into an IDE port with just a physical adapter, and you can do the same plugging it into a PCMCIA slot. The only 'adapting' going on is electrical. The reason the flash card will not work, is probably because the camcorder does some weird way of addressing that IDE hard disk or has some transfer mode that the cards will not support. CompactFlash through that ISA bus is probably PIO only.
Man I wish more things with small LCD screens came with a pop out hood. And I loved your reaching into the view of the camera to point out things in the display.
I like that you have some understanding about the "why". It really makes the videos more fun to watch. All the research you do pays off for me. I get such a good view of the market at the time. Your script writing is really good! I like how you record messages on camcorders from out in the field as part of the video. It's a seemless transition as if you already wrote the script by the time you recorded footage. I'm curious what you did or do for a living that you have so much insight into electronics and videography.
Thank you! Truth be told I'm coming at all this from a position of cluelessness and just trying to build up my understanding based on what I can find in magazines and my intuition, and I have no real experience to qualify me - I've never had a job in video production, and while I've worked several electronics-related jobs, I don't hold an EE degree or anything. I've just always been fascinated by these subjects and tried to learn what I can.
Fantastic video as always. I don't remember if I have commented here before but I have been subbed for a good while now. I hope things are well for you. Loving the content! I can tell that you are putting some serious work into this and it is a joy to see an upload notification. Be well.
It's like the closest thing to a gopro in 1997. I love how it uses a standard rechargeable battery found in most VHS-C camcorders of the era. The video quality is obviously "mashed potatoes" quality, but this is quite a feat considering the technology that was available in 1997.
Can't believe this video is almost a year old. Coming back to it with some context for the contact sheet. When it was inconvenient to just share a video instantly, and bandwidth wasn't cheap, having a contact sheet preview was extremely valuable from what I gather. You can see what the video is before commiting to downloading it.
Oh man, this footage looks EXACTLY like the crappy output from my 2006 phone (which was like 144 lines or maybe less, and the codec was 3GPP and terrible). I put up with it for some of my bad video diaries about school trips, but as soon as I got a stills camera which shot decent-bitrate 360 line footage I never ever used it again.
Also my TV has a macroblocking filter which is one of the only things I leave turned on, as it makes YT and Netflix and such more bearable, especially for SD content. There were moments in the test footage where it just about cobbled together a blurry but tolerable image and then the next frame it all fell apart. This camera’s macroblocking is just too intense and too chaotic for the TV’s algorithms, I suppose.
Your theory that the camera is too underpowered also explains why, in the mid-00s, it was really mostly only phones and stuff like that which produced this level of video. (I also had a very cheap “digital camera” which could only hold 10 photos and made about 3 seconds of similar garbage footage. It was better as a USB webcam, although still very noisy.) The cheapest, lowest-power silicon is what gave this kind of output (I notice Hitachi’s chip says it’s half a watt, which is pretty nicely low. I wonder if the M2 had lower battery lifetime too.)
Really knocking it out of the park with the super smooth and snappy B-roll this time! I think my old Sony (still) camera from 2003ish could record to different folders like that, including its tiny 640x480 MPEG clips. Speaking of, that battery looks suspiciously like an Infolithium M pack with the middle terminal missing.
You really do just hold this thing to record as if holding a phone to record with its own camera, with a screen to look at and everything. Probably pure coincidence, but still cool. I think most Gen Z people would feel more at home using this thing to record video than any other camera you've showcased.
Back in the day, downloading an entire video from Usenet was a real pain, so vids always included a preview jpg, which was a series of still frames in that same 'contact sheet' format, so that's probably the intended use for that feature.
Very interesting, I think the idea with the AV cables was that you would plug those into your VCR and record your video on VHS, I had a digital camera that told me to do that around 2005, and then use the VHS tapes to watch the videos at other people's houses and stuff. The thing I had to wonder at the time was if you are going to do that why not just get a camera that records straight to VHS.
I don’t think my opinion means much, but I think you make really interesting video’s. Your channel reminds me of something from the early Tech TV days.
29:49 this feature is used for taking the camera through a shoot beforehand then using that pre-footage to create a storyboard to use later. For example, you're a wedding videographer and you need to compose your shots and choose your positions beforehand so you're not scrambling during the ceremony. So you go to the church say the day before and have some willing or otherwise participants to stand where the couple would be standing so you can gauge the shot for the big day. Then you bring the footage home, and create the storyboard out of it, print that out, and use it to guide your shoot the next day. Its a tried and true step in the process done in everything from slides to polaroids to still video cameras and vhs-c with video printers or a trained memory before this camera. This was Hitatchi's take on that. Honestly if you take that pre-production point of view into consideration, this entire camcorder makes a lot more sense. You need something lightweight, easy, and quick to navigate in order to coax potential buyers away from something like Polaroids taped to a sheet of posterboard, and the "futuristic" nature of digital at the time would be a selling point for said wedding videographers or etc to market themselves over competition. Heck, i literally bought a cheap Kodak Zx1 for exactly that pre-production purpose recently, since I shoot all tape and film and it helps to do run-throughs before lugging all that anywhere. though i admit i hadn't considered the printing out frames angle...yet. Now i will.
The idea that someone tried to make a flip cam in 199-fucking-7 is absolutely astounding to me. I'm now left to speculate about how people have tried to get video onto computers even in periods where the only thing one could do afterward is just write an edited product back to tape. It also reminds me of how the first thing I wanted to play with on my first *actual* computer was Windows Movie Maker, because the idea, however far from the mark I was of doing something like this, or even close to it, of producing *video*. Reminds me of using my grandma's old Minolta VHS deck with a separate camera to learn how to do what would come to be called vlogging when I was 11 and had no internet to speak of, or how I then used that and another thrifted VCR to learn how to dub and then edit footage; how, for many of those early years, I was between working computers because my shit-tier Dell laptop kept eating hard drives and my family wasn't by any means well off enough to keep replacing them. Could it be as simple as saying that "well, people like TV, and people want to be creative, so they view short form video as the most natural means of being creative with computers and have tried to make computers and video work together for far longer than it may have even been practical to so do?" Because I think about like, the vaunted Video Toaster, and how for as unsatisfying as it looks to me, it scratched *someone's* itch for wanting to do video things to computers. And then as you mention at some point, Adobe Premier *already existed* as far back as the Win 3.1 era, so people were absolutely using commodity PCs to do video editing! But to bring it back to the video, this does very much feel like, in its branding and its accessories, a product designed to scratch the same itch, however poorly, of people wanting to take video in a way that would be easy for them to do computer-type things to, well before things like iMovie and the proliferation of small form factor video cameras and flash storage and DSL/broadband internet turned amateur video into something like we see today. Sorry for the Blackboard-discussion-board-ass post, I'm riding gym endorphins and had a lot to say.
great video, very well explained! Probably on consumer CRT (not PVM), picture quality achieved that of VHS enough for the family videos, without the "inconveniences" of it, thus this was never targeted to prosumer market. Any chances of you explainig other sides of profesional video/broadcasting industry in the 80's-90's ? I'm still curious since your video titler video about what actual broadcasting stations would use for titles and overlaying their channel logos and test cards.
In the 90s, people were using CRT TVs. This camera on a small lower end CRT (not a PVM like you show) maybe was watchable. Small, low end CRTs hide alot of artifacts, and if you watch TV from a distance, will hide even more.
It’s competition was hi-8 camcorders. This camera set the benchmark long before you were born, and digital cameras were available. This was the first available. It was awesome for its time.
Even professionally encoded digital video generally blew in 1997. I still have a few DVDs from that year (five of which came bundled with my first DVD player), and they look _terrible_ on anything that's not a consumer grade CRT TV. I think the codecs themselves just weren't up to snuff, because I'm sure that the movie studios and DVD authoring houses would've had more than enough CPU horsepower to throw at the problem, even back then. Fortunately, it didn't seem to take long for MPEG-2 encoding to improve. Most of my DVDs from 1999 have far fewer instances of macroblocking than those really early discs. Actually, they look nearly as sharp and clean as today's DVDs (or, as sharp and clean as 480p allows)!
Yeah, this is why a lot of videophiles stuck with Laserdisc for a few more years after DVD came out. I have a few DVDs from 1997 and 1998 and they are worse than Laserdisc thanks to MPEG artifacts. DVD was also never great at presenting video sourced from composite masters either, the compression just can't handle all the noise well without unacceptable compromises. A lot of boxsets of 90s TV shows (which I think were sourced from D-2 tapes) just look awful.
I think it's improper to say that MPEG1 352x240 is similar to VHS. VHS has the advantage of double vertical resolution which is a huge deal in detail resolving (granted, in shots with less motion).
That battery pack is used in quite a few devices. Cameras and walkie talkies mostly. Some medical (not life supporting) equipment too. I worked at a battery store and sold a fair amount of them
Contact sheets are actually really useful for when you can't _play_ a video before getting it. I use it for torrents of livestream recordings, and early internet access was similarly non-conducive to live playback.
I suppose it's a coincidence that this camera is actually shaped like a potato, given the video quality. The codec and resolution are actually identical to VCD, and I recall that back in the day Nero software could actually accept .mpg files in that format and convert and burn VCDs without transcoding. Might work with this camera's files too. I could be wrong but I think the reason there were 6 folders has to do with file system limitations. Not sure why, but many gadgets like digital audio recorders or still cameras would cap the number of files per folder to something like 999, which is odd since FAT16 should be able to handle 65k files in a folder. Maybe it has to do with ease of navigation or the limits of thumbnail processing.
7:39 that's kinda crazy if you think about it. Nowadays a power supply that size can easily provide over 180w of power, while back then they seemed to be limited to a few watts at best.
An industrial Compact Flash card might have worked better because they can use full ATA IDE mode. There are so many different PCMCIA storage cards I want to try in this camera. Thank you for making this video.
I did actually use one - the card in the video was one I was using later for a different task. I used a WD Silicondrive (more notes in pinned comment.) Thanks for watching!!
This is my basic understanding on compression so some details could be wrong but this is what I believe is happening. In earlier digital video recording the more complex the environment, the compression will take whatever is the dominate color and replace other similar colors with it, and increase the pixel size of the video. That is why when you went outside you the video started to get blocky. This is also probably coupled with the low bandwidth of the hard drive since video would have been fairly bandwidth intensive, which is why when they hard drive was bypassed the compression wasn't as bad. In a basic environment like say a blue or grey sky, its much easier to compress since the dominate color is across the sky requiring less compression so it comes out much clearer and requires less bandwidth.
![I bet YOUR photo printer couldn't do this! [Olympus P330]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZIrQX5bvzow/mqdefault.jpg)
![I bet YOUR photo printer couldn't do this! [Olympus P330]](/img/tr.png)
This is an ideal camera for capturing the foggy, detail free scenes of Bigfoot, UFO's or lake monsters. In fact, I believe this video standard is mandatory.
Gold
Great idea for keywords to use when listing one of these on eBay?
Based hoax creator
I was going to say that it seems like a perfect cam for making a Found Footage style movie. Just need to set the time period for late 90s and up through much of the 00s (especially if using the DSR-50 for moments that need better quality while keeping it looking old). But your idea is like perfect. Would give more recording time than say claiming it was recorded on an old camera phone or something.
To this day, people have not managed to capture higher quality video than this was capable of
Again an excellent video! These cameras are downright fascinating for the time, despite the limitations, and I’m glad the EG1 has now been covered so thoroughly.
On a related note, the M2 was sold as the MP-EG10W once it launched in the US! I've only seen it referred to as the M2 in certain marketing and press coverage hyping up the product.
thank you! I actually held back on mentioning the other model number so people won't go snatch them all off eBay before I can get one lol
Avoding the above-named poster effect! Clever girl....
Yo the videos have been so good and now he got LGR comments hanging down here like jewelry. Be famous already I love you!!!
Oooh approval from LGR! And I agree. Your mix of history, use case analysis, hands on experience and hypothesis is brilliant.
CLINT CERTIFICATION ✅
18:55 honestly the Oneplus > MPEG encoded video just looks like an early UA-cam video, whereas the MP-EG1 looks like a camera made to capture sasquatch footage
that is my feeling about it
Why this made me laugh the way I did, makes me think I need to consider admission to a psychiatric ward 🤣 omgee
@@InspiredSkeptic same, for me it was actually picturing the famous horrible Bigfoot video that cracked me up
"The consumer electronics industry, who are cowards nowa days..." absolutely agree
They are, but I think that Samsung getting to a functional foldable phone in 3 model years is still an accomplishment.
@@ignatgrz despite the screen breaking issues, they're still pushing.
Now *that's* impressive!
Now I’m imagining a building that makes poor quality bricks.
huh, i was just imagining a POOrly constructed brick house
Those would just be shit bricks.
Lol, that one caught me off guard too, should’ve been brick shithouse.
Addendum and corrections:
• "It doesn't look that bad to me" - This is actually my fault. The biggest problem with the raw video out of this device is the egregious, sharp-edged macroblocks, which are just as visible on its direct composite output as they are on a PC. However, I converted all the test clips to MP4 before including them in this video, and didn't think to compare them side by side.
Transcoding to MP4 *at 352x240* causes a significant change in the texture of the image, eliminating the blocking artifacts, so I'm realizing now that it took a lot of punch out of the quality comparisons. This can be avoided by first upscaling to HD res before reencoding as MP4, demonstrated here: gekk.info/videos/mpupscale.png
I will be releasing a followup to this video, because I got the second model in the series, and it answers a lot of the questions I had. I will reencode the clips correctly for that one. For the time being, you can download some of the raw footage here: gekk.info/videos/mpegcam/mpeg1/
• "This isn't that bad if you know what video at the time was like!" - I do. I was there when MPEG was king, I lived through the Realmedia era as well. It sucked, but it didn't suck this much. When I downloaded a video in 1998 that looked like this, I deleted it.
• The reason I say the converted cellphone video "looks almost like a good quality VHS rip" is because at the time, I was referring to a clip I'd made that DID look that good - and then I realized it contained a large area of smooth tones that was probably giving the bitrate a break.
I recorded and converted a new clip that was more realistic, which you see in the video. That one definitely shows the hallmarks of heavy compression, but I just couldn't reshoot the dialogue to soften my praise.
• I forgot to point out the white speckles and streaks that show up in the MPEG footage. I don't know that much about video compression but I've never seen anything like this, and all I can guess is that the compressor is outright buggy and occasionally produces invalid encoding.
• The 16GB CF card you see in the video *was not* the one I tested with. I used a 256MB WD Silicondrive, which are designed to be highly compatible. The camera recognized it, acknowledged it had the free space, but refused to go to video mode, while other modes worked.
My hypothesis is that Hitachi's devs had no time to make the firmware tolerant of inconsistent user-provided drives, so they coded it to refuse to go to video mode unless it detects the precise model number of the HDD they were shipping, probably the only one they had a chance to test against.
Hitachi's documentation on the later M2 model implies that it is far more tolerant of different media. It shipped with a 16MB flash drive and could be used with both the 260MB and a 1GB drive they provided, and that makes me think they had implemented better latency testing and compensation. Again, something that I'm positive would have been in the first model if it had not been rushed to market.
Didn’t know this was even possible back then (I mean I knew it was, just not this compact and consumer-friendly), really cool video bro!
@@snoopdoggthecertifiedg6777 Thanks man!
27:12 - The Video Toaster Flyer on the Amiga used a similar A/B video deck switching metaphor. You would pare down your clips into “croutons” and arrange them in order in a Program (olde timey for Output) window and drop transition croutons between them. There was no timeline at all until third-party devs wrote one. Hell, the hardware itself followed that metaphor - you had “A” and “B” video drives, and a third for audio.
"I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago"
@@CantankerousDave To be fair, the Toaster Flyer was one of the first NLEs ever made. There was no template on how the interface should work. NewTek also had to deal with the limitations of storage I/O at the time, and the use of the Video Toaster card itself for generating effects. The Amiga was just a glorified controller/interface for the whole mess. The magic was all done on the Flyer card (SCSI I/O and video codecs) and the VT4000 card (generating transition effects and graphics).
This looks like the precursor to those "Disposable Camcorders" they sold at CVS back in 2005 that had like 2 hours of storage and they would rip it off for you onto a DVD when you were done. They weren't actually disposable, they would just wipe them and repackage them for the next customer. They were super hackable because the product was made by a 3rd party that had all the drivers and docs for it online, you could just grab a "Disposable Camcorder (maybe it was called a One Time Use Camcorder?)" for $20, wire up the pinout to serial using an old Palm Pilot cable and rip the recordings off it as you pleased. You got a $200 camera for a 10th of the price. Then the "Flip Video" came out which was basically the same camera but reusable with a USB port on it.
oh yeah, I remember kipkay made a video on how to do that, got millions of views.
Oh I remember taking summer money to buy one of those to hack up. I remember it being stupid easy to hack. I bet I still have it in a bin haha! Thanks for reminding me of this!
The earliest videos on my channel were filmed on a Flip, like the brand, not the style of camcorder
love the crunchy mpeg compression on display here. as someone who regularly watches video at low bitrates because of crappy internet my brain is shockingly adept at subconsciously decompressing the artifacts into information and it takes real effort to really examine the clips and notice the macroblocking and DCT artifacting for what they are
Your upscaler AI misses the A part eh?
@@Kalvinjj Nothing can put back what is not there, and just makes it worse in the most case.
@@SeanBZA I know, it's just a joke on AI upscaling and how OP mentally does kinda that... (so not _artificial_ intelligence)
On another note, Waifu2x upscaling for anime-style drawings is weirdly functional. It's incredibly impressive, it sure doesn't restore lost detail but upscaling lines to be properly in place happens like magic.
@@Kalvinjj Yes but line art and cartoon video is very much a good compression, large swathes of same colour, and a simpler colour palette in use as well, so you can upscale much easier there, just have to do edge detection, and remove jagged edges, and fill in with the surrounding colours.
This is exactly the reason why MPEG can do lossy compression. Because it throws away parts that our brain can potentially reconstruct. That's... The whole point.
“Built like a shit brickhouse” 🤣 had me on the floor
Me too, I'm sure there is something wrong with that sentence.
Hahaha such a great play on the Australian saying “Build like a brick shithouse”
This is the best!
@@themusicnerd We have that saying here in the States too.
@@infinitecanadian the saying is “built like a brick shithouse” and he said “built like a shit brickhouse”
Built like a chic Brit house
21:23 Come for the half-hour deep dive into an obscure AV device, stay for the one-second sight gag of text added to the wall in post changing angles and sliding out of frame.
Your attention to production is masterful.
26:08 "Ability to modify the date and time" "I feel that its only possible use would be fraud" There is actually a very practical use for that feature when travelling between timezones. It takes just one slip forgetting to change the timezone while in transit, and then the time and sometimes even dates are screwed up. Had to change exif data on a few occasions because of that.
Or when your camera internal clock is wrong you can correct the date/time on videos.
I am weirdly nostalgic for this era of digital video. The shit colors just hit right.
Yes, I felt the same to. The early internet.
The original potato camera, but built like a tank.
Love the effort and research put into this video, including the hassle of bringing a DVCAM recorder to see its full picture quality and using 90's era computers to demonstrate the features, even to the point of finding a copy of Adobe Premiere 1.0!
Still find it amazing that this was the great grandfather of the Flip cams that were so popular in early 2008-2012 UA-cam before Google sold out.
Haha, thank you! It's actually Premiere 5 - they had several releases on windows 3 that I want to make a video about someday!
I thought about making the connection to the Flip camera (one of the most interesting video cameras in history, sorta) but felt like a lot of people might actually not remember it. You can definitely see that it was on the road there however!
You haven't seen low quality video until you've recorded on a Nintendo DSi camera.
i'm shooting all my videos on one starting immediately. if you can make anything out i failed
Wow, that brings back memories. I still bring my dsixl with me on vacations.
I'm pretty sure most early cell phone cameras (those that could even do video, usually in .3gp format) were worse.
Mylo Com-2
I really hope your channel pops off. I found you a few days ago and can't stop watching your videos. I like that your direct, yet can crack a joke at the right time to keep things interesting. Another interesting thing I notice is that you have a tendency to use really defined words. "Littlerly no one used these" "everyone used this" "I have absolutely no idea how this works".
Its a nice touch and I like your style. Looking forward to the next episode!
I’ve been here since sub 100 subscribers. CRD is going to make it to over a million before we all know it, and I’m here for that too! Support his Patreon if you guys can. This content is only uploaded by a select few at this high of a Caliber and I’d love to be part of and foster an ever growing and supportive community. Thanks CRD and fans!
Ps check out the side channel for the Sunday game streams, pure relaxation and bliss with a bit of perfect dry wit and snappy humor sprinkled in the commentary. What more could one person need?
The DVD camera describes exactly how I feel whenever you upload.
WOOO
Also, good choice of phone. The last flagship OnePlus with a headphone jack.
You said Hypercard. My mid 90's nostalgia just kicked in.
Myst was just re-released in VR, if you want some more Hypercard nostalgia.
You just activated my trap card :)
That text transition at 21:23 is great. It’s the small things!
1997: Hey, wanna see this sweet video I printed out?
2021: Content is content.
They should’ve called it the “Shitachi Brickhouse”
But seriously- this is crazy. I had no idea it existed 🤯
Shitachi Brickhouse Mark I
Hitachi seems to be a name that loves fecal references. In French we often refer to the model Hitachi Yetzu, because Hitachi Yetzu sounds exactly like "il t'a chié dessus" (he shat on you).
There's something about that video quality, it looks like those videos that you would get in a email attachment in the early 00s, videos where incredibly fake shit always happened, it's really strange. Anyway, I wasn't aware of the existence of this device and as always it was a fantastic video!
Oh man great video. That state of the art hardware encoder got a beating from you. There just was no way to make it better at the time and fit it in one chip at reasonable power consumption. A marvel they did what they did at all.
well, you know, once I get an M2 I'll be able to determine if that's really true - I strongly suspect it actually COULD do better, but hitachi's engineers weren't given the time they needed to fully test and calibrate it. We'll see!
I *can't* be the only person who read the title as _"Topless_ Video in '97" and thought CRD was getting spicy
The highest praise I can give to your presentation style is that you're a camcorder-fixated Technology Connections.
I love learning about products that were simultaneously at the absolute razor's edge, but also obsolete at launch. "Now, you can do this!" "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's like a motorized unicycle...it's unique, but hardly useful.
Haha! Tell that to all the people who own motorized unicycles. There are quite a few of them.
“MP-EG1” - I see what you did there, Hitachi
I don’t like how UA-cam is JUST NOW recommending a video from you channel. I feel like I’m behind and now I have to binge watch.
Wow excited for the video. I just noticed youre almost at 45k subscribers. Congrats on the success!!
Dude, this already great channel continues to get even better. Really digging the background-aware titles, too.
I had a terrible day at work, and I'm really happy to see you have a new video up.
Honestly, it isn't that bad for 97'. I was seeing portable digital video of this quality in 2007, the fact this was in 1997 is amazing.
I mean yeah it isn't bad for 1997 kinda. The thing is things like this WERE released and really they shouldn't have been. I remember when the bottom end of things looked like this back then and the problem was it was a waste of money. To get usable digital video back then you had to spend multiple thousand dollars and to get GOOD DV you were spending 5 digits and the first number wasn't a 1. These things should not have existed. 3-4 years later you could buy this quality as a kids toy camera. 2007 the only thing that looked this way WAS toy cameras and flip phones! Even in 1997 this was a waste of money at any price point.
Agreed.
the conpression going haywire on plantlife is something that Tom Scott made a video about
i dont renember the whole video, but the gist of it is that moving green objects reak havoc on digital compression to this very day (our eyes for example have more green than other color receptors so we dont have that problem)
Yeah I was pretty unfair to it but, like I said, a camcorder that can't handle seeing a tree without trashing the entire image is functionally useless haha.
@@CathodeRayDude thats just the woes of early digital video, even TV cameras suffered to a degree, but could compensate w/ resolution
That stand functions a lot like many CRT monitor stands did, I wonder if that's where the inspiration came from.
The first all-digital tapeless video camera was a professional camcorder by Ikegami. They stored video on hard disk drive "EditPaks" and I remember seeing it at the NAB show in 1995. Super rare, super high quality SD and super expensive but incredibly good for instant ingest of digital video for TV news stations. Way ahead of its time and file based video recording didn't really catch on for another ten years until Sony XDCAM professional disc and Panasonic DVCPRO on memory cards. Hitachi also tried out a professional hard drive pack recorder about the same time as this MPEG1 recorder but the first "proper" file based video recording was 25 Megabits/sec DV recording to hard drives and that sort of happened around 1999-2000.
These long in depth videos keep me going on bad days. Thanks for your work and enthusiasm
"Consumer electronics were madlads"
Press e to pay respects for RCA, your vinyl video disc was a cool thing if only it was something other than that :-) Also anyone who presses f is invited to the wake.
Ef
honestly, based on the body style, the swivelling head and the stand style, this thing feels less like a camcorder camera, more like a portable audiorecorder that can shoot scratch video at the same time. you can handheld get a scratch video and audio clip, or a tabletop interview recording, or selfrecorded scratch video and audio notes. it feels like something a very well paid and tech savvy journalist might have used in their toolkit.
That foldout viewer shade was standard on "small size" (4x6cm etc.) still cameras and were also an option on some high end 35mm SLR cameras. Shape is incredibly close to a normal still camera turned 90° . Angled lens swivel makes me think there's a diagonally mounted camera tube inside and the rotating just moves the lens and a mirror.
As for the stand, I'm surprised the main housing doesn't have the standard screw hole, that would fit all sizes of camera or microphone stands at least since the 1950s. I remember one that was smaller than this camera and could be attached to any table, chair or dead tree available.
Pointing to the parts of the on-screen display in-camera must have taken AGES to get right, I applaud your dedication!
Selfie mode.
Excellent video. This channel is so underrated it's ludicrous.
You’re videos are so insanely detailed and well done. You have a new subscriber. I hope one day your channel blows up like clints did. Well done, and well deserved!
I'm so glad I found this channel about a year ago. Nice growth and congrats on your success and yes I'm looking forward to the next one. Also commenting to feed the algorithm.
I wonder if the original owner bought a replacement battery more recently than 1997. When this item came out, I had a subscription to Videomaker, and I vaguely remember an article or advertisement about a hard drive based camcorder. Maybe this was it. With the results you got, it is no surprise that tape formats (Hi8, SVHS, and the new-at-the-time MiniDV) were still the preferred method of acquisition for video enthusiests. Regardless, nice find of a rare piece of gear, and you got the box! Great vid!
I had considered that, but it's an official Hitachi battery, and I feel like nobody could have been sufficiently excited about this thing to buy new packs while Hitachi was still making them. The only way I can imagine it happening is if it sat in a box for 12 years, then someone dug it out, went "huh, i wonder if this was any good" and bought third party ones. Thanks for watching!!
New visitor; 10:15 -- using the actual view through the camera + recorded vid to point out the information on the screen amused me to no end. That's clever!
Thanks for making videos. Please don't stop.
Interested in seeing the M2 comparison.
Thank you!! I'm planning on getting an M2 soon to do a comparison.
Love, love, love what you're doing CRD! Congratulations on taking off! Platinum play button when?!
I love all the little things you add to your videos. Like the powerpoint presentation. Top notch as always dude 😁
tysm! that was a last second addition hahaha, came this | | close to releasing without it and then sighed and went back and edited it in
I appreciate the detail of using real time footage to show the ui of the viewfinder with your hands! Caught me off guard and had to rewind a bit to pay attention to what you were saying lol
I love how in depth you go with your information and research on these topics. 11 out of 10
Your videos are great! I never knew this existed and you going over this is important to preserve history, but also, it's just so cool seeing how these things worked.
In terms of quality of the camera reasoning, I think you nailed it.
Part of the reason is the encode methods for sure, but also another reason which you also mentioned, is lower resolution ADCs.
With an ADC, you want the best possible noiseless signal before going into your quantizer. But even if you have a perfect signal you are limited by something called dynamic range.
In simple words, dynamic range is just the max and min amplitude that your ADC can interpret and is expressed as the maximum signal to noise ratio.
With something like video, you want the most dynamic range you can possibly get. Once this range is exceeded, oversaturation of lighter colors and dulling out darker ones making then look like a blob is what could happen.
Dynamic range is a limit of the resolution of your ADC. An 8-bit ADC has ~49.93 dB and a 32-bit ADC has ~194.435 dB.
Basically it boils down to this -> More resolution = More dynamic range. More bits, more fun!
In terms of this camera, yeah it got the worst of both worlds. Cost and power savings yielded a choice for less processing power with a custom IC and once again cost, board space, and power budgets probably limited ADC/DAC choices and you end up with the worst of both worlds 🤣 less video information retention after encode and awful dynamic range so terrible adaptability to different lighting in scenes. Yikes.
Awesome video! Loved it!
22:20 made my entire month; thank you for this wonderful gift, you own
PCMCIA was basically a miniaturized version of the 16-bit ISA bus. It was popular for storage because in the end, IDE was also that same ISA bus thrown on a cable, with the controller card being inside the drive. So by more dumb luck than wisdom, probably, PCMCIA is (almost) pin compatible with IDE and with an adapter it can take CompactFlash (which in itself is a mini version of PCMCIA/IDE).
Evidence that PCMCIA and IDE are directly compatible is the fact that you can plug a CompactFlash card directly into an IDE port with just a physical adapter, and you can do the same plugging it into a PCMCIA slot. The only 'adapting' going on is electrical.
The reason the flash card will not work, is probably because the camcorder does some weird way of addressing that IDE hard disk or has some transfer mode that the cards will not support. CompactFlash through that ISA bus is probably PIO only.
How amazing you got such a good batt pack on this lil freak of media history from your local store! Amazing! This is the content I am here for!
That old Fujitsu Tablet PC on the bookshelf brings back all of my inner nerd feelings.
Omg yes i had one too
Hitachi seems to always be out there on the bleeding edge of tech, and almost achieved greatness many times over. It’s fun to see their experiments.
29:17 that edited footage clip looks like something that would end up in a "top 10 unexplained and cursed yt videos" compilation. well done.
Man I wish more things with small LCD screens came with a pop out hood. And I loved your reaching into the view of the camera to point out things in the display.
I like that you have some understanding about the "why". It really makes the videos more fun to watch.
All the research you do pays off for me. I get such a good view of the market at the time.
Your script writing is really good! I like how you record messages on camcorders from out in the field as part of the video. It's a seemless transition as if you already wrote the script by the time you recorded footage.
I'm curious what you did or do for a living that you have so much insight into electronics and videography.
Thank you! Truth be told I'm coming at all this from a position of cluelessness and just trying to build up my understanding based on what I can find in magazines and my intuition, and I have no real experience to qualify me - I've never had a job in video production, and while I've worked several electronics-related jobs, I don't hold an EE degree or anything. I've just always been fascinated by these subjects and tried to learn what I can.
Every video you make I look at that LGBT E420 tape case and smile inside. You're such a underrated channel
It’s always a treat when you upload! Hope you’re doing well! ✌️❤️
Fantastic video as always. I don't remember if I have commented here before but I have been subbed for a good while now. I hope things are well for you. Loving the content! I can tell that you are putting some serious work into this and it is a joy to see an upload notification. Be well.
Recently subscribed, your videos are definitely up their with the 'best gems' of my subscription feed.
GREAT VIDEO!!!! And great editing!
It's like the closest thing to a gopro in 1997. I love how it uses a standard rechargeable battery found in most VHS-C camcorders of the era. The video quality is obviously "mashed potatoes" quality, but this is quite a feat considering the technology that was available in 1997.
I'm not surprised ... Many wireless controllers and similar gizmos available on AliExpress use ripoffs of Nokia's old batteries :-)
Can't believe this video is almost a year old.
Coming back to it with some context for the contact sheet.
When it was inconvenient to just share a video instantly, and bandwidth wasn't cheap, having a contact sheet preview was extremely valuable from what I gather. You can see what the video is before commiting to downloading it.
Also, the ui closeups are more reminiscent of contemporary MacOS. Who exactly was their target audience?
I actually paused and rewound to appreciate the little bit of editing at 21:22, I see you, that was clever
Oh man, this footage looks EXACTLY like the crappy output from my 2006 phone (which was like 144 lines or maybe less, and the codec was 3GPP and terrible). I put up with it for some of my bad video diaries about school trips, but as soon as I got a stills camera which shot decent-bitrate 360 line footage I never ever used it again.
Also my TV has a macroblocking filter which is one of the only things I leave turned on, as it makes YT and Netflix and such more bearable, especially for SD content. There were moments in the test footage where it just about cobbled together a blurry but tolerable image and then the next frame it all fell apart. This camera’s macroblocking is just too intense and too chaotic for the TV’s algorithms, I suppose.
Your theory that the camera is too underpowered also explains why, in the mid-00s, it was really mostly only phones and stuff like that which produced this level of video. (I also had a very cheap “digital camera” which could only hold 10 photos and made about 3 seconds of similar garbage footage. It was better as a USB webcam, although still very noisy.) The cheapest, lowest-power silicon is what gave this kind of output (I notice Hitachi’s chip says it’s half a watt, which is pretty nicely low. I wonder if the M2 had lower battery lifetime too.)
What a terrifically thorough video. Love it!
Really knocking it out of the park with the super smooth and snappy B-roll this time!
I think my old Sony (still) camera from 2003ish could record to different folders like that, including its tiny 640x480 MPEG clips.
Speaking of, that battery looks suspiciously like an Infolithium M pack with the middle terminal missing.
thank you! yeah, it looks so much like an Infolithium that I tried one, and it doesn't quiiiiite fit. bummer!
@@CathodeRayDude Gah, don't you hate how many similar but only slightly different batteries exist? Even within one manufacturer...
Once again, great video! Love seeing your channel growing!
You really do just hold this thing to record as if holding a phone to record with its own camera, with a screen to look at and everything. Probably pure coincidence, but still cool. I think most Gen Z people would feel more at home using this thing to record video than any other camera you've showcased.
It’s a form factor that keeps coming back tbh. Flip cameras of the mid-00s did it too
The greenscreen and text overlapping stuff is great work I loved it!
Back in the day, downloading an entire video from Usenet was a real pain, so vids always included a preview jpg, which was a series of still frames in that same 'contact sheet' format, so that's probably the intended use for that feature.
What brand and model is that combo floppy drive is that under the black LG black DVD Burner? Nice video like always!
Very interesting, I think the idea with the AV cables was that you would plug those into your VCR and record your video on VHS, I had a digital camera that told me to do that around 2005, and then use the VHS tapes to watch the videos at other people's houses and stuff.
The thing I had to wonder at the time was if you are going to do that why not just get a camera that records straight to VHS.
Intriguing little camera! Kinds of things I love to thinker with. New studio lightning? Nice!
I don’t think my opinion means much, but I think you make really interesting video’s. Your channel reminds me of something from the early Tech TV days.
Always great to have a new CRD video notification pop up on my phone!
always good to hear this
I just got the suggestion, I forgot you have to turn on all notifications to actually get them smh
Great video! Such an underrated channel!!!
29:49 this feature is used for taking the camera through a shoot beforehand then using that pre-footage to create a storyboard to use later. For example, you're a wedding videographer and you need to compose your shots and choose your positions beforehand so you're not scrambling during the ceremony. So you go to the church say the day before and have some willing or otherwise participants to stand where the couple would be standing so you can gauge the shot for the big day. Then you bring the footage home, and create the storyboard out of it, print that out, and use it to guide your shoot the next day. Its a tried and true step in the process done in everything from slides to polaroids to still video cameras and vhs-c with video printers or a trained memory before this camera. This was Hitatchi's take on that.
Honestly if you take that pre-production point of view into consideration, this entire camcorder makes a lot more sense. You need something lightweight, easy, and quick to navigate in order to coax potential buyers away from something like Polaroids taped to a sheet of posterboard, and the "futuristic" nature of digital at the time would be a selling point for said wedding videographers or etc to market themselves over competition.
Heck, i literally bought a cheap Kodak Zx1 for exactly that pre-production purpose recently, since I shoot all tape and film and it helps to do run-throughs before lugging all that anywhere. though i admit i hadn't considered the printing out frames angle...yet. Now i will.
The idea that someone tried to make a flip cam in 199-fucking-7 is absolutely astounding to me. I'm now left to speculate about how people have tried to get video onto computers even in periods where the only thing one could do afterward is just write an edited product back to tape. It also reminds me of how the first thing I wanted to play with on my first *actual* computer was Windows Movie Maker, because the idea, however far from the mark I was of doing something like this, or even close to it, of producing *video*. Reminds me of using my grandma's old Minolta VHS deck with a separate camera to learn how to do what would come to be called vlogging when I was 11 and had no internet to speak of, or how I then used that and another thrifted VCR to learn how to dub and then edit footage; how, for many of those early years, I was between working computers because my shit-tier Dell laptop kept eating hard drives and my family wasn't by any means well off enough to keep replacing them.
Could it be as simple as saying that "well, people like TV, and people want to be creative, so they view short form video as the most natural means of being creative with computers and have tried to make computers and video work together for far longer than it may have even been practical to so do?" Because I think about like, the vaunted Video Toaster, and how for as unsatisfying as it looks to me, it scratched *someone's* itch for wanting to do video things to computers. And then as you mention at some point, Adobe Premier *already existed* as far back as the Win 3.1 era, so people were absolutely using commodity PCs to do video editing! But to bring it back to the video, this does very much feel like, in its branding and its accessories, a product designed to scratch the same itch, however poorly, of people wanting to take video in a way that would be easy for them to do computer-type things to, well before things like iMovie and the proliferation of small form factor video cameras and flash storage and DSL/broadband internet turned amateur video into something like we see today.
Sorry for the Blackboard-discussion-board-ass post, I'm riding gym endorphins and had a lot to say.
this is exactly what id expect from an mpeg1 camera. its glorious
great video, very well explained! Probably on consumer CRT (not PVM), picture quality achieved that of VHS enough for the family videos, without the "inconveniences" of it, thus this was never targeted to prosumer market.
Any chances of you explainig other sides of profesional video/broadcasting industry in the 80's-90's ? I'm still curious since your video titler video about what actual broadcasting stations would use for titles and overlaying their channel logos and test cards.
I remember that proprietary Hitachi plug. Couldn't find the cord at the pawn shop but just connected it my old NTSC screen until I mapped the pins
In the 90s, people were using CRT TVs. This camera on a small lower end CRT (not a PVM like you show) maybe was watchable. Small, low end CRTs hide alot of artifacts, and if you watch TV from a distance, will hide even more.
Pointing out the icons on the display by recording your hand is genius, haven't seen that before XD
It’s competition was hi-8 camcorders.
This camera set the benchmark long before you were born, and digital cameras were available.
This was the first available. It was awesome for its time.
Even professionally encoded digital video generally blew in 1997. I still have a few DVDs from that year (five of which came bundled with my first DVD player), and they look _terrible_ on anything that's not a consumer grade CRT TV. I think the codecs themselves just weren't up to snuff, because I'm sure that the movie studios and DVD authoring houses would've had more than enough CPU horsepower to throw at the problem, even back then.
Fortunately, it didn't seem to take long for MPEG-2 encoding to improve. Most of my DVDs from 1999 have far fewer instances of macroblocking than those really early discs. Actually, they look nearly as sharp and clean as today's DVDs (or, as sharp and clean as 480p allows)!
Yeah, this is why a lot of videophiles stuck with Laserdisc for a few more years after DVD came out. I have a few DVDs from 1997 and 1998 and they are worse than Laserdisc thanks to MPEG artifacts. DVD was also never great at presenting video sourced from composite masters either, the compression just can't handle all the noise well without unacceptable compromises. A lot of boxsets of 90s TV shows (which I think were sourced from D-2 tapes) just look awful.
I think it's improper to say that MPEG1 352x240 is similar to VHS. VHS has the advantage of double vertical resolution which is a huge deal in detail resolving (granted, in shots with less motion).
That battery pack is used in quite a few devices. Cameras and walkie talkies mostly. Some medical (not life supporting) equipment too. I worked at a battery store and sold a fair amount of them
Awesome channel brother. I thought I was alone out here in the world in love with vintage electronics. 🤗
Contact sheets are actually really useful for when you can't _play_ a video before getting it. I use it for torrents of livestream recordings, and early internet access was similarly non-conducive to live playback.
The audio on this thing is actually PHENOMENAL what the hell
I suppose it's a coincidence that this camera is actually shaped like a potato, given the video quality. The codec and resolution are actually identical to VCD, and I recall that back in the day Nero software could actually accept .mpg files in that format and convert and burn VCDs without transcoding. Might work with this camera's files too.
I could be wrong but I think the reason there were 6 folders has to do with file system limitations. Not sure why, but many gadgets like digital audio recorders or still cameras would cap the number of files per folder to something like 999, which is odd since FAT16 should be able to handle 65k files in a folder. Maybe it has to do with ease of navigation or the limits of thumbnail processing.
7:39 that's kinda crazy if you think about it. Nowadays a power supply that size can easily provide over 180w of power, while back then they seemed to be limited to a few watts at best.
Another in-depth video. Well done! ✌
An industrial Compact Flash card might have worked better because they can use full ATA IDE mode. There are so many different PCMCIA storage cards I want to try in this camera. Thank you for making this video.
I did actually use one - the card in the video was one I was using later for a different task. I used a WD Silicondrive (more notes in pinned comment.) Thanks for watching!!
@@CathodeRayDude Thanks for the heads up. That comment is not currently pinned though. I really appreciate your attention to detail.
This is my basic understanding on compression so some details could be wrong but this is what I believe is happening. In earlier digital video recording the more complex the environment, the compression will take whatever is the dominate color and replace other similar colors with it, and increase the pixel size of the video. That is why when you went outside you the video started to get blocky. This is also probably coupled with the low bandwidth of the hard drive since video would have been fairly bandwidth intensive, which is why when they hard drive was bypassed the compression wasn't as bad. In a basic environment like say a blue or grey sky, its much easier to compress since the dominate color is across the sky requiring less compression so it comes out much clearer and requires less bandwidth.
The video quality looks like a "premium" version of what the Handspring/PalmOne Treo's camera had several years later :)
Every video you pull some new, great editing trick :')
If not multiple times even!
I'm trying my best! Even for enthusiasts this stuff can be dry, a little spice never hurt
@@CathodeRayDude one's best is always the best! The strive and drive to improve is what's seriously impressive!