#88 - A Brief History of the Camcorder

If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s like me and my sister did, then there is a good chance that at some point, someone in your family likely videotaped you during an event or family gathering on their camcorder, whether you liked it or not!  When camcorders became readily available for consumer usage in the 1980s, their popularity exploded and every Dad, like mine, rejoiced.  I have been combing through old home video footage for the past few weeks and so I felt like it was time for a show focused on these groundbreaking devices.  So sit back and relax while we take a trip back to the 1980s to discuss the backstory behind camcorders! 

Thank you so very much for tuning in to the Pop Culture Retrospective Podcast. This show is dedicated to the memory of my big sister Rebecca, a fan of all things pop-culture, particularly of the people, places, and things that defined the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.  Welcome aboard this pop culture time machine, I'm Amy Lewis. This is episode #88 - the history of Camcorders.  According to ScienceDirect.com a camcorder is quote:  a combination of a television camera, a video recorder, and a synchronization pulse generator, allowing you to record video and sound on a miniature cassette, digital versatile disc (DVD), or memory card, and subsequently transfer the signals to a full-size DVD or other medium.

Believe it or not, amateur video recording is not necessarily a new phenomenon from recent decades.  It actually goes back a lot farther than that. Louis Le Prince is often credited with being the first person to ever film a video on a recording device back in 1888, which was just about 100 years before, literally, a consumer video camera arrived in my family.  This happened  when he created a single lens camera and captured video of a group of people walking around a garden.  The short video is called “Roundhay Garden Scene.”  I’ll post a link to this video in the show notes.  

In the 1950s, the ability to record video onto tape became more prominent and it was during news broadcasts that people were able to see traditional video on a screen.  Cameras were huge back then, they were rolled around on trolleys, and they were heavy and cumbersome.  It would take a few decades before video and film cameras were created for consumers.

Kodak created a system called the Kodak Super 8 in the 1960s, making it’s debut at the 64-65 world’s fair. Kodak Instamatic Movie Camera with Dick Van Dyke (Commercial) (1971) It grew in popularity and gained a lot of momentum in the 1970s, especially when sound was added to the system in 1973.  

Film for these cameras came in a cartridge and the camera was on top of a pistol grip was was really an ingenious design.  This led to a real home video boom in the 1970s. Families could now record several minutes of video and sound clips together.  After the video was taken, it then had to be sent out to Kodak for them to process, which took several weeks.  After it was processed it could be viewed on a projector.

In the late 1970s, VHS technology was gaining more and more momentum and eventually video was able to be recorded onto VHS tapes.  It was still a cumbersome process but it was more durable than traditional film reels.   

Sony of course didn’t want to sit on the popularity of home video cameras, so they released one of their own.  The BMC-100P was a camcorder that recorded onto Betamax tapes.  Betamovie Sony Commercial It had to be held on one shoulder.  Most often, that would be on the right hand shoulder.  I never really thought about this, but the vast majority of camcorders are geared for right handed people.  If you listened to the episode about the history of the VCR, then you may remember that in the late 1970s/early 1980s, there was a video format war of Betamax vs VHS and ultimately, VHS won.  With that in mind, electronics companies wanted to get in on the VHS craze.

Before the inception of the camcorder, video filming required two separate devices - a video camera and a VCR. That all changed in 1984 with the release of the JVC GR-C1. JVC Video Movie Camcorder Commercial 1985 Produced from 1984 to 1985, this model was groundbreaking for the home video nerds of the world, including my Dad who had a later JVC camcorder model.  The camera could record up to 30 minutes at a time on a TC-30 tape.  It could zoom up to 6x and even had a headphone jack.  My dad used that camera all of the time, for over a decade capturing a lot of our family’s memories like soccer games, christmas, baby showers, and our day to day lives.  It irritated me and my sister sometimes when we were kids, but I am so grateful that my dad filmed us despite our complaints.  Watching videos of my sister isn’t easy, but getting out an old fashioned ugly cry is very therapeutic.  If you visit my website or IG account, you will be able to see some old home video footage that I was able to digitize.    

This camera represented the first time home video recording became accessible.  It could hold enough tape for 40-120 minutes of VHS recording.  In the early-to mid 1980s, camcorders were pretty expensive, they average cost was about $1500 which is about $4500 in today’s money.  

When the JVC camera appeared in Back to the Future, it became even more popular.  More recently, the camera was featured in the TV series Stranger Things.  

In 1985, Panasonic, RCA, and Hitachi all released their own VHS camcorders.  Sony introduced the first of their handycam camcorders at this time as well.  The handycam name was utilized for all of their camcorder incarnations even when additional features were added later like night vision, SD storage, etc.  

In 1987, full size or Super VHS camcorders came out.  Unlike previous models where a small tape would have to be dubbed onto a VHS take, these larger systems did it all in one.  

The first fully digital recording device was the Ricoh RDC-1 which was introduced in 1995.  It could film in a resolution of 768 x 480 pixels.  For the first time, video recordings and still images could be captured without film and without any tape.  And around this same time, DV and mini-DV digital camcorders were released.  With this digital technology, video and audio quality was improved.  Sony released their mini DV camera, the DCRVX1000.  The camera put footage onto a small cartridge which could then be easily transferred to a Mac or PC.  

In 2000, Hitachi released the MV100, it could record directly to a DVD disk.  

In 2001, I graduated from high school and I got one of the best gifts I could have ever asked for - my own personal video camera.  The timing was impeccable because about 2 months after I graduated from HS I left to work at Disney World for a semester so having a video camera was exciting because I think my parents knew just how much I would want to film every second of my time there and boy were they right.  I was gifted a Sony handycam vision Hi-8 analog video camera.  1994 Commercial: Sony Video 8 Camcorder  Coincidentally, several of the commercials for handycams around that time were filmed at WDW, go figure.  My specific handycam camera featured a rotatable flip screen where you could see what you were shooting in color, and also an adjustable viewfinder that was black and white.  It also featured nightshot which actually made dark footage look worse/like a security camera. I loved it though and got a lot of use out of it at WDW and later in college.  The video was recorded onto a Hi8 tape which was about the size of a cassette tape.  I would then connect my camera to the VCR and then I could record the footage from a hi8 tape to a VHS tape.   

In 2003, Sony introduced the first completely digital video camera.  No more tapes, or discs were necessary.  This was sort of the very beginning of the end, in some ways, for the traditional camcorder.  

Flip cameras came onto the scene in 2007. Product Spotlight: Flip Video Ultra It very quickly became popular due to their convenience and excellent video quality, and eventually had 13% market share.  The marketing tagline for flip cameras was “simple to shoot, simple to share.”  And that was true because the cameras were relatively small in size, about the size of an iPhone and it had a USB connector attached that could easily be plugged into a computer.  There were just a few control buttons on the camera including a record button, buttons for the zoom features, as well as a play button and a delete button.  The camera could film in high-definition and the battery was rechargeable. The flip video camera and other USB cameras were popular when I was in graduate school.  We used them to film our mock counseling sessions, we could check them out from the AV department.  The cameras had a strong run for about 3 years and then pretty much dropped off the face of the earth once HD video cameras were released. 

Camcorder companies realized that cell phone cameras were another place to start putting cameras for still images.  First Sharp added cameras and then Samsung did.  This would eventually then lead to video cameras being added to phones and the rest is, well, history.  In 2010 the iPhone 4 was released and it could should HD video.  This is where camcorders really started to decline.  

However, there was a temporary resurgence in 2011 when Sony, JVC and Panasonic released camcorders that could film in 3D.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RubwCAHm1ok&list=PLSqhoxMvfoTgVO_gVapSlM5yxztq6_59M&index=6 

2017 was the last time that a new camcorder was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show or CES.  It seems the vast majority of the consumer market prefers to film with their cell phones.  So essentially by the late 2010s, the camcorder, as we and all 80s dad’s knew it, was a thinking of the past.  

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I hope you enjoyed this look back on the history of the camcorder, I know I did.  We covered just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the camcorders and personal recording devices that have been on the market since the 1980s.

With the advent of cell phones replacing point and shoot cameras and now camcorders, I had to ask my friends, followers and listeners of the show what they do with the videos they record on their phones and here are the results:

On Twitter and IG, I  asked:  What do you do with the footage on your cell phone? 0 % said they compile videos together into a longer one (sort of like the home video concept), 40% said it just stays on their phone and 60% said they don’t film much.  IG - 11% said compile them, 67% said it just stays on my phone and 22% said I don’t film much.  

I was surprised to learn that more people don’t do something above and beyond just capturing video on their phones.  I would strongly encourage you to do so, if you can.  Compiling the videos may take some time, but programs like iMovie make it really easy. Let’s all pledge to revert back to the 1980s and 1990s where all of the video clips taken by our friends and family got put onto a tape so we could watch it over and over again.  Don’t let memories sit on your phone.  

I hope you will join me for my next show where we will be taking a look back at more fascinating facets of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.  UT….