EEVblog

[@Coolkeys2009]

Thanks for turning the device on and giving a demo of it's performance.

[@userPrehistoricman]

you're on the wrong channel lol

[@CCSDoggy]

Coolkeys2009 Don't turn it on. Take it apart!!!

[@MikeAustin2012]

I managed a night club in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA till 1991 when it sold to a new owner. We took photos of the customers with a Sony camera that looked like this. I swear it only held 24 to 30 images per disk. Once a filled 3-4 discs, I would transfer to VHS tape to play for the dinner crowd or slow nights. Since there was no HD at the time and we did have a big projector TV (Water cooled 3 x 5" or 7" tubes to make an image up to 25' diagonal!!! ) that thing new was something like $14,ooo. My customers loved the Video part of the club. Thanks for the memories!

[@FranLab]

In the mid-90's I was doing analog video capture with my Windows 3.1PC from S-VHS video - Very similar concept - and it worked for building the original Frantone website in late '95.

[@jasonmushersee]

In the late 1980's our high school had 1 ibm with the original junk microsoft windows software & this new "mouse interface controller". It was the most sophisticated tech in our entire city of 2200 and cost the school district thousands but we all hated it because bill gates software kept crashing & we'ld loose everything before saving it to file. I still preferred the apple 2 with noisy keyboard keys that echoed down the hallway like a marching band & the dos software with floppy disc.

[@blackbird8632]

Hey Fran, love your channel!

[@dextrodemon]

when i was in primary school we used to go down to the photo developing place and ask for the used disposable cameras, then we'd get the wires going from the capacitor the the flash bulb and use them as a little taser, those were the days.

[@EEVblog]

Nice!

[@PlasmaHH]

I still have a bag full of them circuit boards out of these...

[@joblessalex]

Torc Handsomeson I totally did the same many times!

[@ManWithBeard1990]

I didn't tase people with it but I did use the flash in class to annoy the teacher. In the end she could even hear the capacitor charging and she'd look at me with a "don't you dare" look. And then the flash went.

[@danielneve9997]

+Minecraft King based on your name I don't think you are even old enough to buy lighters...

[@ABaumstumpf]

Dave - even with analog media you Can ask how much data it can store. When you store it on a magnetic drive like that video floppy, then you will have a few key specifications that can tell you how much data it can store. Bandwidth, SNR, length. Simplified you can say Bits = bandwidth*SNR*length/3 (just a practical application of Shannon-Hartley and Nyquist-Shannon Theorems.)

[@spywarefinder]

Oh! I'm at work and there's that camera in our IT room! Awesome!

[@hadron2]

I was always amazed by these as a kid, even though I never saw one in the flesh. Having seen inside it, they are no less magical to me.

[@AgnostosGnostos]

During the early 90's era, films were expensive and their development long and costly. Also no way to delete a bad photo. Something that was easy with the video floppy disk. Kodak had digital photo cd but the film should be digitized by a special center into a photo cd. The photo cd was working only with Kodak photo CD player connected to a conventional tv. If the floppy video disk was cheaper than film then this camera was certainly useful. The camera is actually digital but the storage medium is analog. The major obstacle of early digital cameras wasn't the digital image sensor but the digital storage. This camera as all high end analog gadgets of 90's is a miracle of miniaturization with many chips and boards. Today an integrated circuit can do many jobs. There was a similar Canon still camera from 1988, the Canon RC-250

[@AndyClements]

I remember using this camera back in grade school. The images were often just used to make slide show videos on the VCR. When we wanted them on the computer there was a video capture device that grabbed just the single frame. I think it was plugged into a Power Mac 5200, maybe something earlier.

[@AndyGraceMedia]

The real application for Video Floppies was in industrial video equipment. They were mostly used in medical and dental surgeries when you needed a fast frame-grab of an X-ray image. Other applications too - including TV graphics frame stores. These cameras I guess were semi-pro versions of the same thing. Oh and the Hi-band/VF version of which this is one did store the chroma and luma separately. That's why there's an S-VHS output to monitors/industrial S-VHS recorders which cost about $10k.

[@ExStaticBass]

It's things like this that make me sincerely glad we've all gone digital. What a mess for a simple task. Great teardown Dave.

[@RetroSwim]

I suppose there is an industrial use case where you need to capture images of plant equipment, then take them back to a hut/office for review. The loss of image quality over 35mm is a reasonable trade-off for the immediacy. You mention taking a video and pausing, but (speculation follows) this camera probably records the whole frame progressively, even if it plays the frames back interlaced, reducing the time delta between fields that you might experience on a true video camera. Also I wonder if the frames stored on the outer tracks of the floppy disk have better horizontal resolution than those on the inner tracks?

[@JessicaKStark]

I kinda want a modern digital camera in that form factor....

[@Landes1024rs]

Those images are beautiful and I'll bet some shitty indie band would love to have one as their album cover.

[@leisergeist]

3x3 I'm sure there's still hipsters somewhere that still use these

[@nicolas1400]

3x3 Paul McCartney already did that on 'Driving Rain' album cover using a Casio wristwatch

[@ethanpoole3443]

TheGuyWithTheBratzDollz You can still add serial ports to modern computers (both the USB variety as well as real hardware serial ports). Many applications still use serial ports for low speed data exchange. Even many USB devices are really only emulating an internal serial port if only low speed data is required.

[@psychoasshole]

they see me trollin'. they hatin'.

[@martinbrewer7629]

Back around 1993/1995 I was working for Securicor Ashley/Radiocoms, an electronics assembly factory in Midsomer Norton (The company went through a number of name changes ending up with Herald Electronics after Sercuricor sold out). One of the products we built during this time was the Canon PC digitizer cards for grabbing the video output from these stills cameras. We only used to build about 50 cards in an eight hour shift on a really clapped out Dynapert MPS-500. Suppose Canon didn't expect to sell as many capture cards as they did cameras. Guess the things must have been stupidly expensive too...

[@abhineshsethumadhava]

dear evvblog. You just decimated a perfectly working classic master piece in the name of science. Now please put it back if you can.

[@holnrew]

This is so cool, I had no idea stuff like this existed

[@BogdanSerban]

Any chance of making a video about how they designed PCBs before CAD software was even a thing?

[@OrangeHarrisonRB3]

Graph paper and a compass?

[@oniruddhoalam2039]

They used Dave CAD.

[@Wasted_on_4loko]

"Shove it up the clacker" EEVDave - 2016

[@matsv201]

... We had one of those in my Highschool.. works really well. We had a special capture card in my Highschool to use the image from the camera. This was in -94 so it was 486DX33 computers.. so fairly good for the time. Well the first JPEG standard was finished and start to be used in 1992 Intresting side not is that some of the cameras used on the moon landing used a simular method. But they use multiple frames for a single photo, making HD resolution image on old analog hardware. Flash was freaking expensiv in the early 90. Even kByte level flash was freaking expensive. Also there was no reasonable compression. PNG didn´t have sufficient compression. GIF had to use color reduction and JPEG was not really avalible. Even when it where (1992-1994) the processing power needed to compress JPEG was not reasonable in a small device. Needing 32bit processor to do that and was really not untill the GBA when there was cheep powerefficent 32 bit processor for mobile devices. That also why the early digital cameras was that freeking expensive because then needed a 32 bit processor

[@EEVblog]

According to Wikipedia compliance testing didn't start until 1994.

[@Conenion]

PNG initial release was Oct. 1996. PNG and GIF are losless and not meant to be used for photos. You do not need a 32 bit processor for JPEG. Designers of JPEG also had ASICs to be used in cameras in their minds. So, you'd have a SoC with a hardware JPEG compressor right next to a (slow) CPU.

[@matsv201]

EEVblog Yea, but there was draft versions since 1992, and they was in heavy usage log before it was certified.

[@matsv201]

Conenion "PNG and GIF are losless and not meant to be used for photos." No.. lossless can be used on photos with no problem.. Of cause the files is a lot bigger. The issue with GIF its that it uses 8 bit color of a pallet that is totally useless for photos. PNG works just fine and is a good alternative to RAW if you don´t need the RAW functionality Anyway. GIF is fine to encode with a 16 bit processor, no problem. PNG i don´t know, but i would imagine it would work to. But JPEG uses FFT and it need 32bit floating point. You can emulate floating-point as well as 32 bit. But emulating both is very inefficient. Also the flash was horribly expensive. Remember buying the first digital camera around 1995. Had a 2MB memory with a horrible special compression algorithm that looked auwfull. 8MB of memory was just as expense as the camera, and that was really expensive. Also uses serial cable for transferring so it took ages. Just a one or two years later jpeg compression chips was everywhere a dime a dussin, and then digital camera become every mans product.

[@Conenion]

matsv201 > But JPEG uses FFT and it need > 32bit floating point. Totally wrong. (JPEG is using a DCT, btw.) It does not need 32bit floating point. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Discrete_cosine_transform "The DCT temporarily increases the bit-depth of the data, since the DCT coefficients of an 8-bit/component image take up to 11 or more bits (depending on fidelity of the DCT calculation) to store. This may force the codec to temporarily use 16-bit numbers to hold these coefficients, doubling the size of the image representation at this point; these values are typically reduced back to 8-bit values by the quantization step." Also, in a hardware (ASIC) implementation there are no fixed bit width of any registers. Any register can be as wide as the designer wants it to be. That is the reason why hardware implementations typically use fixed point numbers and abjust bit width to the task at hand. Thereby avoiding floating point. This is faster than any (32bit) processor can be, since it is a very specialized hardware solution which is always faster than a (general purpose) processor (using the same implementation technology/silicon). It usually also consumes less power. Today such hardware implementations are less and less needed, since processors are fast and power efficient enough. But in the 90ties it was a totally different situation.

[@thesillyhatday]

I kinda like the way the pictures look. I bet you could get some interesting effects out of this!

[@scottyleics]

finally a new teardown video.. they seem so few and far between now :(

[@jasejj]

I'm pretty sure there was a professional version of this that TV companies used as an electronic still store. My local station had one (several actually) that used floppy discs in the mid 1980s in the news department.

[@whitcwa]

+Jason james, it must have been a small market station, we had digital still stores since the early '80s in major markets. They were very expensive and used big 300MB interchangeable disk packs.

[@scottgfx]

Dave, the measurement of 300 or so lines is the horizontal resolution. Not to be conflated with the number of scanlines, the horizontal resolution is the number "vertical line pairs" that can be resolved. It's dependent on the bandwidth available. Cheers, and thank you for the videos!

[@emmettturner9452]

The problem with using flash back then wasn't just write speed, read/write cycles, or other supporting technologies, it was capacity. Flash capacities were super low in 1991 and costs were high, like large EEPROMs.

[@makomk]

Yeah, it basically took the invention of NAND flash to achieve useful capacity for applications like this, I think.

[@BlankBrain]

People in real estate might have used them to do walk-throughs, then show them to prospects. Now they use HD drones. I wonder if they were used to capture scope traces (to replace Polaroid cameras). By the time these came out, good storage scopes had been around for ten years.

[@dlarge6502]

Wow what a coincidence! I had just learned of the existence of these (didnt have any in my school during the 90's) and am just deciding on bidding for one on ebay, and a teardown video pops up at the same time! Also I can confirm that there were stand alone units that would play the Video Floppies. They would be used more in a school or company for digitising many images from different cameras. I've read these devices and their media were also used by the BBC in some cases for taking shots that can be inserted and mixed with live video. Back in the day it looks like they were terribly expensive. basically the same cost as high end SLR's today. Canon's offerings (there were other makes of VF cameras) were some of the cheapest and most commonly what schools would look to acquire.

[@Grcbyte]

Thank you for the video! I love Teardowns ;)

[@andrewmorris7483]

I love all things camera! I'm a 'lectric hobbyist second and a photographer first and Dave is just the bees knees.

[@lihourj]

I bought one of these in 1991. As a typical early adopter I totally fell for the concept of taking photos electronically. Though looking back the image quality was not great. The fatal flaw was that as mentioned in the video you could only view your photos using the camera itself. So if your camera stopped working, you effectively lost your entire photo collection! In '92 I sometimes used a Apple Mac II at college with video capture card to digitise the video output. I then Photoshopped the images. It really was the precursor to the digital camera. I still have the floppy disks but cannot view the photos. I have no idea if the image data is still readable but I hope I can retrieve the pics one day.

[@mortente]

Years ago we had a video printer at work which could print still frames on thermal photo paper, that could probably be used with this to print out the photos from the camera. We used it to print pictures of defects when we inspected oil pipelines in the north sea.

[@EgoShredder]

I remember when my uncle brought back a digital camera from one of his trips to Japan, which I think was around the mid 1990s and was less than one mega pixel. I thought it was amazing, although my uncle was more amused than impressed; he has always been an early adopter with technology. Years later in 2009 he gave me an old Olympus C-2000 Z two mega pixel, which was top of the range in 1999. It's still a very capable camera to this day, although since 2013 I use a Panasonic DMC-FZ150.

[@pypes84]

I got one of these because I get a massive hard on over obscure media formats, never bothered firing it up though.

[@scottgfx]

There were home and industrial players made. Some TV stations used them to hold station identification or trouble slides when digital still-store systems were too expensive.

[@JohnAudioTech]

We had a similar Canon model at work. It had the same disks and form factor. We had the expansion card that fit in a PC and could create an image file from the video. The film adapter allowed you to copy 35mm film and slides. We bought the whole system and it wasn't cheap. I don't remember the exact price but you can buy a professional DSLR for the same money now.

[@Lachlant1984]

I'd be curious to hear what kind of noises the disk drive made when recording and playing photos.

[@DaveMcAnulty]

You just need a Snappy parallel port capture device to go along with it :D

[@ZXGuesser]

The number of lines for the camera sensor, and the interlacing on the output makes sense when you think about a 625 line video signal. This is capturing one field of presumably 288 picture lines and must output it on both odd and even field to get a 25Hz 576i video output.

[@brianoconnell6459]

Back in the day (1991) I worked on a fanzine, and we regularly took the old 8mm camcorder out on shoots, to do frame caps on a Mac for later publication. I could see someone using this for the same thing (and back in the 80s and 90s, film developing was still a little expensive, video cameras provided a way to have reusable media).

[@DanSpotYT]

You did a better job of pics with that thing than many do with fancy stuff nowadays. :)

[@mrbluenun]

Hi, And so many thanks for the camera and all the innards you were able to access and show though I an sure there was a whole lot more that was inaccessible. I think this is pretty elegant. Thanks again and what an extraordinarily ingenious and clever little package with barely any wasted space, and I love the way the ‘shape’ of the outside and of course the inside was cut and skimmed to achieve not only ‘more space’ continued round a bend with the Flexi ribbon but as you say gives continued useful space through clever engineering.

[@paulkocyla1343]

I had video digitizers for the C64 and the Amiga500, both needed a few seconds to get an image from a PAL video signal. This camera was my dream at these days, as it would allow to get pictures into a digital format when using the digitizers. It was pretty expensive though, I could not afford it.

[@NathonDalton]

Why did the main sensor traces in the glass package have loops? See time stamp 16:38 to see what I'm talking about.

[@furrball]

I can confirm touching one of those flash caps can be painful. It made one of my fingers feel numb for a good 15 minutes. Of course not intentional, I just tapped it by mistake while opening a compact digital camera.

[@FredBedderhead]

I still got mine, it the other model and In NTSC there is a switch on the bottom of mine that for interlaced and progressive I use a video blaster to capture the pictures

[@joe72205]

Lines of video resolution refer to horizontal resolution (= bandwidth). PAL video is always 625/576 lines of resolution vertically

[@John_Ridley]

No trimpots on the back, but there are adjustable inductors.

[@EEVblog]

Forgot those!

[@shlomsi2000]

But you didn't forget you mentioned them here 28:45

[@gregkrobinson]

So is it digital?

[@littlegrabbiZZ9PZA]

Greg Robinson nope. You know how a VCR saves video to a tape? This does essentially the same thing, but with single frames.

[@gregkrobinson]

So which digital format is it? Jpeg? Bitmap? Gif?

[@chjunk231]

Pal

[@gregkrobinson]

So how many bytes can the disk store?

[@EEVblog]

Troll'o'lol'o'lol...

[@cnvogel]

@7:45 the Composite & S-Video outputs on the power-supply/umbilical cord adapter: S-Video had significantly better quality, and the "Film Adapter" connector probably went to a dedicated printer or film-exposure/camera box.

[@Ucceah]

please tell me somebody put it back together

[@SpenCrowson]

I still use my old Mavica FD95 as it takes excellent shots. I do have more modern equipment but the Mavica is my fave.

[@RickThornquist]

Funny thing, Dave, I have an RC-250 (NTSC) that I was going to send to you. Guess I don't have to now! You could indeed hook it up to a computer and save the images using a video capture device. I did it with my Amiga and used the images for my computer graphics work in Lightwave 3D.

[@teuton8363]

was there not some kind of automated trimming for the trimmers?

[@fixman88]

I think I remember seeing that camera in ads back then, I thought it was...odd. I was a Polaroid camera buff back then. That floppy disk looks like the ones some models of standalone word processor used to use to store text files years back.

[@skonkfactory]

"Lines" with respect to analogue video doesn't mean vertical picture lines. It means that 320 light-to-dark transitions can be distinguished on each horizontal line; so the 6 dB point is at that frequency.

[@harrieke61]

there was a isa interface card availlable, with which you could download your fotos to your computer. using the interface box. The batteries are only made for this camera and are not made for some time now, so they are not for sale anywhere now.

[@awnnerd]

There was a PC connection cable which let you copy directly. I still have one of these in the loft, and yes, it also works.

[@patatino666]

NO PC connection ! A Photo print laboratory uses Video output and a video grabber with the worst print i ever seen ! (personal experience)

[@fighter199212]

Theres the logo of the German Post service on it! next to the big Z on the sticker on the back. Its a posthorn on 2 side facing arrows. I think this might have been a company machine to document shipping handling or something... What do you think?

[@Max27653]

it's the equivalent to fcc in the us. every device used to have that in germany

[@nekomasteryoutube3232]

Rather interesting piece of hardware. Reminds me how I use to get some pictures back when I was a kid in the early 2000's. Being poor we couldn't afford much but we got a NTSC Chunky old Video Camera that recorded video OK, and to make pictures I'd connect a second VCR to record stills from the Regular Sized VHS. I don't have these around anymore as we've lost many things over the years, including tossing our collection of VHS tapes (at one point we had at least 100+ VHS tapes stored in their own cabinet). Though maybe its for the best I don't have those OLD still's VHS tapes (I probably recorded some silly stuff a 12-13 old kid might record)

[@SoCalFreelance]

Messing with the iris is what a Cyberdyne terminator teardown video will look like 25 years from now

[@necessaryevil8615]

It has the old fashioned curved traces on the PCB, see for example at 10:39. I have seen this before and I'm wondering why they did it that way and also why they don't do it anymore. And what is beter in terms of RF effects, curved traces or 45° angles?

[@fryode]

The picture quality reminds me of the Mitsubishi DJ-1000 I picked up for $3 in the bargain bin at a local computer shop in 2000. By then, the camera was already three years old (released in July 1997) and seeing it Brand New In Box should have been a red flag, especially since I had bought a Kodak DC200 display model a year before that for $160 (and you could flash them with the firmware of the new $499 DC200 Plus to gain live view and such) that would do 1MP photos. I mostly bought the DJ-1000 because I managed to score a brand new HP 320LX HPC/Palmtop for $10 from the same bargain bin on the same day. I used the hell out of that thing. I'm getting all nostalgic about the HPC now. I remember I even used it with a 56K X-Jack modem to connect to the Internet on a dare and pull up the Penny Arcade webcomic on the 640x240 green-backlit gray screen. I remember the modem got warm fast.

[@MatthewSuffidy]

It may have a video memory that it encodes into video. I am not sure how it 'stores' an image for output otherwise. You could either sample the output of the sensor or monitor the memory to make a digital image, but it is not worth the effort.

[@AntonyTCurtis]

Laserdisc was also analog video. It likely stored one image per track.

[@emuboy85]

I'm out of my comfort zone! where is the "Don't turn it on, take it apart?" :O

[@mankee2211]

Andrea Campanella Australian Inversion Paradox - happens from time to time depending on the moon position.

[@emuboy85]

must be the seasons inversion...

[@LasseHuhtala]

I loved playing around with the sequential mode on the ION, made some fun animations on the Amiga with that. :-)

[@raindogred]

chrikey that brings back lots of memories.interesting times...i remember playing with that camera in '93 or so, at work in Qld govt..Bought for the purpose of getting still images that we could put into power points or project images at lectures, but they couldn't get images out of the thing. At the time you could digitise images but it meant taking an image on a film camera, getting the film developed, getting it scanned and turned into a tiff file (which were huge and un-wieldy to use on old computers). The Ion was going to save time and money..but the Department really jumped the shark on that one :) Canon ion pretty much went un-used for a year or so untill the graphic design unit bought a Quadra 840av apple macintosh. The "av" obviously was audio video and that computer model was the first of it's kind I believe as it could capture 16bit/48hz audio and s-video which was pretty advanced. That camera got used for a while, sporadically..eventually marked for disposal a couple of years later (mid 90s) along with an apple newton that no-one could ever really find a use for :) And replaced by the Apple "Quiktake"..first digital camera on the market... the good old days...theydefinitely had more money than sense..

[@mr_gerber]

The Quiktake was by no means the first truly digital camera on the market. There were several digital cameras in the late 80's (>5 years before the Apple), but these were not portable models in the sense we talk about digital cameras today (See MegaVision Tessera, Kodak DCS with its HDD, etc.). The first commercial digital camera was the Fuji DS-X, that came out in 1989 in Japan.

[@PlasmaHH]

18:23 this is probably why they use bed of nails instead of connectors... datasheet likely reads "rated for one time plug in only"

[@AiOinc1]

The Zenith Super Sport I believe had a 2 inch diskette drive.

[@eyreland]

The use of B-MAC, D-MAC etc ... did not happen until about 3 years after this device was made. MAC image encoding at least would have provided some TV format independence, but due to patient issues it could not be done...

[@mooseblaster]

For those who do want to ask "theoretically, how big would a digital diskette have to be to give the same result as a Video Floppy Disk?" the answer would be around 26.3MB. This is based on it having a hypothetical resolution of 320x576 (as Dave says, it was only 320 lines, not the full 625), with 3 bytes of data making up each pixel (a byte each for each colour, as per this document on uncompressed image sizes: blog.photoshelter.com/2008/06/uncompressed-image-file-size/ ), and multiplied by 50 (for 50 photos) to give the answer in bytes. Divide that by 1024 for KB, than 1024 again for MB, and you get 26.3MB.

[@deadfreightwest5956]

I think this was a useful tool for realtors and insurance adjusters. What you can't see won't hurt them.

[@skuula]

How does that work? How to play back a PAL field 50 times a second, other than from a digital framebuffer, a scanning head or a 3000 RPM (hm) disk?

[@TheColinputer]

Looking at that floopy disk mech it looks alot like a mini disc. ( I know MDs are slightly larger) Given they were developed by Sony aswell looks like they re used some of their previous work. Also how fast did the disk in this spin? Would of had to been pretty fast to get enough head to disk speed to record video effectively.

[@coondogtheman]

There must be a way to capture the raw data from the disk and translate it to an image. Possibly through those four test points. And I have a video game on the PS2 called Mercenaries Playground of destruction and during some of the missions where you kill the bad guys you take a picture of them and the camera used in the game looks similar to this one.

[@raekane]

I had always been fastenated by those cameras and format ever since I used one in high school. We had a still video frame grabber card plugged into a Mac. There existed stand alone VF disk drives that could playback on a TV. I think that there was a laptop that use the disk digitally.

[@pauldickhoff3594]

almost everything needed for portable digital image capture was absent in the early nineties! These were the days we had NiCad batteries, 3,5" 720Kb disk were all the rage and the best we had on offer were newfangled VGA cards capable of showing 640x480 resolution in 256 colours! Hardly any of this could be mashed together in a handheld device costing less than several months of wage. People rarely appreciate the difficulties engineers face. Technology isn't a status quo. Even our current High tech will be puzzling to future generations on how and why we didn't do it like this or that.

[@bitrot42]

300 lines would have been the horizontal resolution. (The number of vertical lines is fixed in the PAL standard.) Analog lines of resolution don't directly equate to pixels, but a comparable digital unit would be somwhere around 360x576.

[@fotofillholland]

I'm wondering about the purpose of the glass in front of the sensor, I thought perhaps some of filter, perhaps UV. a quick Google hints digital sensors may not need, but it is 80s tech. enjoyable watch as always, thanks Dave.

[@adrianmodeli5312]

I think that still video cameras were briefly popular with photojournalists in the late 80s - early 90s because the images could be sent practically instantly (probably using something like SSTV over a phone line) rather than waiting for film development and mail or travel back to the publisher. A technological dead end for sure, but still pretty neat.

[@LaurentLaborde]

Why the weird connector shape in the glass sensor case ? Does it have some electrical properties ? Mechanical ? Just a bored engineer ?

[@TheSliderW]

Dave, What's wrong with S-video ? I though it was supposed to output a better image quality than composite. Is something wrong with this unit ?

[@Saavik256]

The first "selfie" is the 1839 self-portrait of Robert Cornelius. Sorry to burst your bubble. ;) Also, there's one of these on ebay going for about $400. :P

Dave, if you can upscale your new videos to 1440p, the quality youtube offers is much better!

[@jamesv833]

Disappearing solar panel video?

[@stinkycheese804]

Isn't the tech we developed since then, mind bogglingly awesome? Wonder what we'll have in 25 more years.

[@m4d3ng]

Haha I bet the reconstruction video would be hilarious

[@doctorweile]

Quite clever ingeneering for the time in my opinion.

[@AgnostosGnostos]

Better than buying films again and again. The video floppy disks were a better solution for people shooting many many photos.

[@rickyrico80]

That moment you realise you are officially considered retro... fml

[@BastetFurry]

As a DOS gamer i have that all the time. You sit there, play Doom or Dungeon Master 2, blink and its 2016. Terrible. o.o

[@lunokhodtoy]

did you manage to put it in one piece again?

[@scottgfx]

The cost and availability of flash memory is one issue, but the bigger problem was having enough CPU power to compress images and bandwidth to move the data around. Moore's law will get you every time!

[@PirateRipleytheFam]

I really couldn't understand this, then it hit me... the floppy disk is not a data floppy. Its a tape like used in audio or a video recorder . Somehow they figured out to make it in that shape compared to a reel tape. Its just magnetic's, No files or formatted material , just raw images recorded. Some can't see true old school nature or magic of taping things years ago. I miss 8-track tapes.

[@tarnvedra9952]

Is that a post horn symbol on back side label?

[@RicoElectrico]

Ondřej Dujka Yes. I guess post and telecom office. So equivalent of a FCC mark.

[@atmel9077]

I think so

[@heikomanderfeld7784]

Yes because back in the Days there was no Telekom it was all the "Bundespost" so it was all regulated by them all transmitting devices had such a symbol after they were splitted up it to Telekom and Post so Telekom for Communication and Post for packages and Letters ... (sorry for my English)

[@WieEiPiehGuy]

As far as I know this represents the German Fernmeldetechnisches Zentralamt. Before the CE mark was introduced all communications devices in Germany were checked by FTZ and given a specific number (displayed next to the post horn logo). All legal communications devices were to carry those FTZ numbers.

[@redtails]

I would argue that this camera is digital using an analog storage medium.. just like computers use magnetic storage to store data.. I mean the cmos sensor reads out the light digitally and the floppy disk only contains 1 or 0.. Analog would be if it's chemically or structurally stored or something, like on LPs and film.

[@ninjatech123]

The floppy would be analog, similar to a VCR tape. The values off the ccd wound be analog voltages too, that camera has no ADC to convert to digital values.

[@Fake_Blood]

With this vintage gear I always wonder how much it costed at the time.

[@mrnemo204]

Is there a NTSC model?

[@l3p3]

Fuck NTSC, pardon.

[@ollylewin]

Ardin Anester NTSC= Never The Same Colour.

[@omnious5928]

I have a Canon xap shot rc-250 it won't display to TV anymore

[@DoRC]

This thing must have seemed like science fiction when it came out:)

[@nonenowherebye]

So the video floppy was actually an analog device, not digital. there was no data per se on the floppy, it was just an analog video frame.