This is a VHS cassette.
And so is this little thing!
It's a variant of VHS known as VHS-C.
And its main feature is that despite being a wildly different size,
the tape inside this cassette stores the exact same video signals as a big boy VHS cassette.
This doesn't have as much tape in there, of course, only 1/4 of what's in a standard T-120.
But because this is still VHS,
if you want to play this tiny little tape in a standard VCR, all you need is one of these adapters.
Just pop the small tape inside this thing, and with a little motorized assistance it is now a full-sized VHS cassette
playable in any VCR.
Now, you might wonder why anyone would want such a diminutive little videotape.
If you're old enough, you know the answer but you might be surprised to learn, as I was,
that this hit the market before the thing it was made for.
Yep. Upon release, VHS-C was a pretty pointless product.
But it was definitely impressive.
See, we used to be obsessed with miniaturization, especially in the '80s.
As consumer electronics were getting smaller and cheaper, we got such a kick out of shrinking stuff into tiny versions of the original thing
to the point of it being a fad.
We still do this to some extent,
but now the actual electronics in any given thing are so small that we're mostly free to design devices however we want.
Or at least however designers think we want them -
oh, we're all so thrilled you made it even thinner this time!
That's definitely the thing I'm thinking about most when shopping for a phone.
Hands up if you'd take an extra millimeter of thick for an extra two or three hours of battery life.
That's everyone, right?
I wonder when they'll notice!
Anyway, back in the 1980s, videocassette recorders were a prime target for miniaturization because they used to be
this big.
This VHS machine is from 1979,
and it's totally fine for sticking on top of that huge console television set in the living room...
but it ain't super portable.
Which is a bummer because one of the most exciting use cases for these things was to record home movies with sound!
And without having to take your film in for processing.
Thanks to the advent of consumer-grade video cameras like this thing,
your VCR could not only record TV shows so you could watch them later,
but could now be upgraded to record precious family memories, too.
But lugging this thing around wasn't exactly fun, and it also meant you'd be tethered to a wall outlet.
However, this machine contains more than just the tape transport
(meaning the mechanical parts that actually interact with and record onto the tape).
It's also got a power supply, a television tuner, and a timer to be a full-featured television recording device.
That's what video cassette recorders were sold to do,
which is why they're called VCRs and not...
"VHS players." [shudders]
I will die on that hill.
Anyway, before long, some enterprising folks thought to remove the transport from the everything else, and we got
these.
This is a portable VCR.
The tape transport was made as a separate unit from the tuner, power supply, and all the rest
so it could be detached and lugged around while powered by a rechargeable battery.
And thanks to this connector on the side which delivers power from its battery to a connected camera,
you've got a reasonably portable video recording setup.
This is really how home video worked in the early days.
It was a hassle!
Clearly, recording home movies on videotape wasn't going to go mainstream until somebody figured out how to combine all this nonsense into one device.
But no matter what you did, the videotape transport was still gonna be pretty bulky.
That's because the signals which are recorded onto the tape get put there by magnetic tape heads riding on a quickly spinning drum.
If you want to know why, you can check out this very old video of mine.
But the important thing is for video signals - you need that thing, and it's pretty big.
Sony was the first to figure out how to shrink it while still recording the same signals onto the tape,
and they commercialized their technique with the Betamovie all-in-one camera and videotape recorder
(or camcorder)
which hit the market in 1983.
I've also made a video about this thing because it's delightfully insane!
It can't play its own tapes!
Now, the reason why is incredibly fascinating and the result of some amazing out-of-the-box thinking.
This device really is a remarkable technical achievement.
But since it was completely useless unless you had already bought into the Betamax ecosystem,
well it didn't have very broad appeal.
It might have swayed some people who hadn't yet purchased a VCR into going with Beta.
But by 1983, Betamax was already struggling quite a lot.
And because every single thing Sony tried to do to make Betamax better than VHS was swiftly copied by JVC,
not long after Sony pulled off their miraculous shrinkage of the Betamax tape transport...
the VHS manufacturers followed suit.
They also did it in a less technically interesting but much more reasonable way
and this allowed VHS camcorders to play their own tapes!
Useful!
This is an example of such a camcorder.
This was made in 1987, and it's a fully featured yet very compact VHS VCR
which just so happens to have a camera bolted to it.
And with this device, we can see the last remaining problem.
You can shrink the tape transport, but you can't shrink the tape.
All of the mechanical duads that actually touch the tape are in this small section.
Only about one third of this thing's height is taken up by the tape recording bits.
The other two thirds are just to hold on to the cassette itself.
The full-size VHS cassette just wasn't really optimized for portability.
This isn't huge, of course, but you're never going to be able to shrink something down to palm sized if you have to fit one of these in there somewhere.
That's why this camcorder is actually a little bit bigger than the Betamovie.
Beta cassettes are smaller than VHS cassettes.
Still, the mechanism this uses to record onto the tape is really quite tiny, so...
what if you just made the cassette smaller?
That's the point of VHS-C.
Or at least it would be eventually.
Believe it or not, VHS-C hit the market back in 1982,
meaning this predates the camcorder.
At first, JVC was just riding the wave of making things tiny and tried to one up their competition by selling an even portabler VCR much like this one.
In fact, oddly enough, here they are together in this issue of Popular Science.
And the accompanying article very astutely makes the reader ask,
"Okay... but why?"
See, initially VHS-C tapes only held 20 minutes, and it doesn't look like the first recorder which used them could record in the slower SLP speed so...
ya got 20 minutes per tape, which was a pretty significant limitation.
And remember, 1982 was still early days for the VCR.
Lots of people didn't have them yet,
and one of the biggest selling points for portable VCRs like this was that the same device could be used at home for typical VCR duties
and taken with you on vacations for makin' memories.
JVC's new 20-minute version of that idea just didn't make any sense.
As a matter of fact, JVC had created the miniaturized VHS-C cassette so early
that miniaturization of the electronics and the tape transport hadn't even happened yet!
Teardowns of the JVC HR-C3 reveal that it's still got the full-size VHS head drum and transport in there.
Sure, the device is a triumph of packaging,
but the only thing that meaningfully shrunk was the cassette itself.
And since JVC's machine with its tiny, useless tapes wasn't actually that much smaller than a full-size VHS portable,
it was only ever going to appeal to those who were more concerned with looking like they were living in the future
than actually making rational buying decisions.
It's a good thing those people exist, though.
They're very profitable.
But despite being rather useless upon release,
JVC knew exactly what they were doing when they came up with this idea.
They saw how electronics were just getting smaller and smaller.
So, it wouldn't be long until they could make a remarkably small camcorder using these new tapes.
In fact, just 2 years later in 1984, JVC would release the GR-C1, also known as the VideoMovie.
This camcorder has been immortalized as the portable television studio that impresses Doc Brown so much in Back to the Future.
It used a similarly shrunken head drum as the Magnavox unit we looked at earlier,
allowing the entire tape transport to be barely any wider than the tiny cassette.
There was still much to make smaller, though.
In 1984, video imaging technology largely still relied on bulky tubes like this.
That's one of the reasons so many early video cameras, including the VideoMovie, have the lens offset from the rest of the machine.
A tube very much like this had to be behind the lens and you needed to put it somewhere.
But before long, the solid state image sensor on a chip known as the charge coupled device would take hold,
which meant the camera part of the camcorder could get much smaller, too.
And with electronics continuing to shrink, before long, we had truly palm-sized video cameras like this.
Okay, palm-sized might be a bit of a stretch, but Panasonic was confident enough to call this a Palmcorder.
This camcorder is from 1991, and it represents the standard form factor of compact camcorders from the late 1980s through the early 2000s.
Eventually, we'd get flip out LCD screens as found in this JVC unit,
but you can tell that other than just rearranging a few things, it's the same basic device.
Everything is built around the tiny brick-like VCR at the core of it all.
And though it is tiny, it's also fully featured.
These will record in SLP mode, stretching recording time to an hour on the original TC-20 cassettes
or 90 minutes on the by this point common TC-30.
There were also 40 minute VHS-C cassettes which could hold two hours in SLP,
but they had very very thin tape which made them prone to damage and thus they were pretty rare.
Now, this video isn't really about these camcorders.
It's about the cassettes they use.
Camcorders will come up again because VHS-C did have some notable competition,
but for now, I want to focus on all the clever things JVC did with this design.
The job of any video cassette is really quite simple.
A VHS cassette is just a plastic box which contains two reels of half-inch wide video tape.
But it's a very standardized plastic box which holds that tape in a very specific way
so that machines with very specific parts can grab hold of that tape, pull it out of the cassette shell,
and thread it around a very specific series of magnetic tape heads and pinch rollers and junk
so it can record or play back very specific signals on the tape.
Plus, of course, the reels which hold the tape need to have standardized cogs so that very specific spindles inside the machine can turn them,
required for fast forwarding and rewinding as well as taking up slack during playback.
But the mechanism inside a VCR which drives the spindles that turn these cogs is somewhat bulky.
And the inner diameter of each spindle takes up space in the center of the tape spool that could otherwise be tape.
It's not much of a problem when ya got big ol' reels like this,
but the point of VHS-C is to be not big.
JVC solved both of those problems by simply getting rid of one of the spindles.
The supply reel of the VHS-C cassette has a standard, though tiny, tape reel with a cog in its center.
But the take-up reel is driven by a simple gear.
In fact, that gear is the bottom of the take-up reel.
This allowed the drive components of the transport to be made smaller, which was good for making smaller cameras.
And it meant the cassette could hold more tape.
That might not be so obvious until you take one of these apart.
The supply reel is actually slightly larger than the take-up reel.
Notice the point where the two reels meet is quite a ways to the right of the center line.
Despite being different diameters though, the smaller take-up reel is able to hold on to the same amount of tape.
That's because its inner diameter is much smaller thanks to ditching the standard cog and spindle arrangement.
And if you're wondering why the supply reel doesn't use the same trick,
well, that will become clear once we look closlier at the adapter.
Like full-size cassettes, a locking mechanism is present to prevent the tape from unspooling when it's being transported.
The spools are unlocked by a pin pressing up in the bottom left corner of the cassette's underside.
Though apparently the earliest cassettes didn't feature that.
VHS-C cassettes also have a right protect tab.
But unlike the full-size cassette's break-this-bit-of-plastic-off one and done scheme,
it's usually a sliding plastic tab which can be moved back and forth.
This made a lot of sense considering many people would hook their camcorder up to a VCR,
dub whatever they recorded on vacation onto a full-size tape,
and then erase the camcorder tape to use again on the next trip.
However, it should be noted not all cassettes feature that.
Some older ones have the same one and done, peel it off, you know the drill.
But other than these relatively minor differences
and a much, much flimsier protective cover over the tape which is extremely easy to break off,
these are just VHS tapes.
But tiny!
And that gave them quite the compelling trick up their sleeves.
The tiny little VCR in this tiny little camera is in fact recording onto these tiny little tapes
in the exact same way as this ancient VCR.
This is still VHS.
And the VHS-C cassette was made ever so slightly thinner than a full-size cassette so that it could fit inside one of these.
This, as you saw in the beginning, is a VHS-C adapter.
And here's a very nostalgic sound for some of you:
[plastic buzzy rattling]
Simply plop the camcorder cassette into here, close the door, and it will, thanks to a double-A battery,
automatically move these rollers up and out to pull some of the tape from the VHS-C cassette forward
and into the position it would occupy in a full-size cassette.
It even features a locking mechanism to keep the moving rollers in place.
And it is now playable in any ordinary VCR.
You could even record onto it if you wanted to.
The adapter reveals why the supply reel still has the normal VHS cog design.
Without a VHS-C cassette in here, this is just a hole.
But with one in place, the full-size VCR can engage with the supply reel without ever knowing a difference.
And to turn the take-up reel, the adapter uses its own cog to drive this small gear.
That gear then engages with the take-up spool of the VHSC cassette.
This thing truly turns these little cassettes into a big cassette and it just works!
It even has a little feeler which engages with the write-protect slider of the VHS-C cassette.
If you don't have it protected, the cassette presses on the feeler and the plastic square here stays flush with the cassette shell,
signaling to a VCR that it can be recorded onto.
But if I slide the tab over to the protected position, the feeler will extend into the void space which allows this to move inward,
signaling to the VCR that the tape cannot be recorded to.
This thing may just seem like a small party trick, but it's really the entire reason VHS-C exists in the first place.
JVC didn't want to create a new standard.
They just wanted to create a new form factor for the next generation of recording devices which they knew were coming,
while retaining compatibility with existing hardware.
In a lot of ways, you could call this an ancestor of the microSD adapters you're probably all familiar with.
Though, personally, I think it's a lot cooler.
It even turns the take-up reel so the tape gracefully retracts into the cassette shell as the roller guides return to their original position.
And just so you know, while motorized versions of these were pretty common, there were also manually powered ones, too.
If I find the one I have lying around, you'll see B-roll of that now,
though, sadly, this one doesn't have the cool write-protect slider feeler tab thing.
Sony knew that with the VideoMovie and VHS-C,
JVC had not only one-upped the Betamovie but had completely obliterated its chances of ever making Betamax popular.
The one limitation of VHS-C, its recording time, was solved by full-size VHS camcorders like this,
which were themselves barely larger than the Betamovie.
The writing on the wall was clear enough.
So, for camcorders, Sony decided to pull a Sony
and just start over with a new format called Video8.
Well, okay, it wasn't just Sony.
Video8 started development in 1982 and JVC was actually part of that.
So was Kodak!
But Sony was the first company to release a camcorder which used this new tape format and it was released in 1985.
Video8 was in many ways a more properly miniaturized videotape format.
The 8 references the 8mm wide tape found in a Video8 cassette,
and actually the format is more properly referred to simply as 8mm videotape.
Video8 is technically a brand in much the same way LaserDisc is.
And the compatibility mark for the format is just this eight in a box.
Creative.
Anyway, the narrower tape meant that the cassette could shave off a half centimeter in thickness compared to VHS-C.
But it should be noted that length and widthwise the cassettes are a very similar size.
In fact, VHS-C is slightly smaller in both width and height so really the main size difference was the thickness of the cassette
which was only 5 mm less than VHS-C and so hardly relevant.
For example, here's a Sony Handycam from 1995
and you'll notice that it's pretty much the exact same size as the Panasonic Palmcorder.
It is a little less tall thanks to a clever packaging trick of the format where the cassette actually ends up surrounding the video head drum slightly,
but that trick requires a much more complicated eject mechanism.
I mean, look at that.
That's a bit much, isn't it?
I don't mean to suggest all Video8 camcorders did this.
Later models were able to simplify the loading and unloading process,
but the point is the size difference in both the media and the camcorders themselves is not that significant.
So why did I just call Video8 more properly miniaturized?
Well, since Video8 wasn't limited to the recording techniques of a nearly 10-year-old videotape format,
it can record a full two hours of video onto one of these cassettes and at its highest recording quality,
which was about the same as standard play mode of VHS.
And it, too, offers a slower recording speed to stretch recording time with a sacrifice in image quality,
meaning just one of these could hold 4 hours of video.
This literally is a properly shrunken videotape and not just
"VHS, but in a smaller box."
And that's where the size difference becomes relevant.
These two Video8 cassettes will hold 4 hours of video at their highest quality, whereas these two VHS-C cassettes will only hold a single hour of video at full quality.
They can record 3 hours in SLP, of course,
but Video8 could record 8 hours in its long play mode on the same two cassettes.
No matter how you slice it, the thickness of VHS-C combined with their shorter recording time means they're gonna take up more room in the camera bag.
Video8 also had a few technical advantages.
VHS camcorders almost always used the linear audio track from the original VHS standard.
This was, at best...
fine, and in the slower recording modes, it sucked.
Video8 stored frequency modulated audio alongside the video signal,
giving it nearly perfect audio quality and thus a huge advantage.
It even offered digital audio, though it was rarely implemented.
Now, it should be noted that VHS Hi-Fi, which worked in a very similar way and had excellent fidelity even at its slowest recording speeds,
was starting to become common by the '90s.
But because of how VHS cobbled that feature together using extra heads on the video drum,
implementing it in compact camcorders was more technically difficult so it was pretty rare to see.
And thus SLP recordings on VHS-C tapes would almost universally have potato-quality sound.
So Video8 is clearly superior, right?
Well, and here's the moral of this story:
That depends on how your brain works.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone shopping for a compact camcorder in, let's say, 1990.
Beta is already the butt of jokes, and like most people with the money for a camcorder, you already have a VHS VCR at home permanently hooked up to your TV.
If you go for a Video8 camcorder, then you'll get yourself a remarkably small camera
which can record two hours of video onto a single cassette at its highest video quality and with excellent sound.
But it's a weird cassette that only exists for your camcorder.
This means when you get back from vacation, you're going to have to go through the clunky process of hooking up the camcorder to your TV
and dealing with its tiny little buttons just to watch whatever you just recorded.
There's no getting around that.
Well, that's not completely fair.
For one, it did come with this remote control to make the process of watching your tapes slightly less annoying.
And standalone VCRs for Video8 tapes did exist on the market.
But the trouble was they never sold in meaningful numbers because nobody was going to buy one when they already had a perfectly good VHS VCR.
In the context of the home, Video8 just doesn't offer any serious advantages over VHS.
It is cool that the tapes are much smaller,
but outside of really specific niches like in-flight entertainment systems,
that just didn't matter all that much and Video8 was always going to be
"that weird camcorder tape."
You could make your life easier by hooking the camcorder up to your VCR
and making a VHS copy of your Video8 tapes so you wouldn't have to get the camcorder out again.
But that would be a second-generation copy with reduced image quality and, depending on your VCR, reduced sound quality, too.
Not everybody's going to care about that, but it is something to note.
If instead you chose VHS-C, well then you will be limited to a half hour of full quality recording per cassette.
But when you're back from vacation,
you just pop the tapes into the adapter which came with your camcorder and you can watch them immediately on your TV with no fuss at all.
At worst, you'll have to rewind them.
That was not a small selling point!
VHS-C was still VHS and that mattered.
There was already a huge ecosystem for that format which showed no signs of going away.
And everyone you knew had a VCR which could play the tapes your camcorder made so long as you brought the adapter with you.
Plus, you'd be watching the original tape with no generational quality loss.
And remember, you're not actually limited to 30 minutes.
SLP recording mode is always an option for situations where you need more time.
It just means the video will look a little worse and the audio will probably sound like this.
[muffled, with a high-pitched background noise] It turns colors when you put it in the refrigerator‽‽
That's what I find so interesting about VHS-C.
It was objectively a compromised product.
Literally technology from the 1970s made compact purely through getting rid of three quarters of the tape and calling it a day.
Yet the very things that make it so compromised would go on to become a huge advantage in the niche that it filled.
Choosing between Video8 and VHS-C basically boiled down to this:
How are you planning to use your camcorder?
Because here's the thing.
For a lot of people, the 30 minute recording time of VHS-C didn't feel like much of a limitation.
Home video recordings are a whole different ballgame from recording TV or renting a movie.
And the vast majority of home videos, even America's Funniest, are relatively short clips of stuff.
I mean, this is still true to this day.
How many of you are regularly recording videos on your phones that exceed a half hour?
And back when you had to handhold a camera this bulky and heavy,
millions of parents desperately wanted their kid to hurry up and unwrap the presents already!
Their arm's gettin' tired!
Plus, while I'm barely old enough to know this,
you'd struggle to get the battery to last through a half-hour of recording in practically any compact camcorder back in the day.
I looked it up and the battery this Sony camera came with could do 80 minutes at best.
But if using its flip out LCD screen instead of the black and white viewfinder and recording clips rather than non-stop,
two things most people were going to do,
30 minutes of recording time was all Sony expected you to get.
So if you're going to need to swap the battery out after just a half-hour of recording,
just what exactly is so problematic about needing to change the tape after a half-hour?
With my sensibilities, Video8 would only be the obvious choice
if you absolutely knew for sure that you'd be making continuous recordings longer than 30 minutes.
Actually, strike that
if you absolutely knew for sure that you'd be making continuous recordings longer than 90 minutes.
Actually, strike that again,
if you absolutely knew for sure that you'd *regularly* be making continuous recordings longer than 30 minutes
AND were also entirely unwilling to sacrifice image or audio quality to do that.
Actually, strike that again,
if you absolutely knew for sure that you'd *regularly* be making recordings longer than 30 minutes
which you *also* insisted must have the best audio quality you can get out of a...
camcorder microphone AND where you had a big enough battery to actually accomplish that.
That's the real kicker.
The advantages of Video8 are clear and very real!
But they're also mostly situational and aren't going to matter to everybody.
And while VHS-C did have one clear disadvantage which was impossible to ignore,
it was still the same VHS everybody already had.
The fact that the tapes this camcorder made have been played in probably half a dozen VCRs over the years is both quite handy and impressive.
And because of that, these two formats coexisted.
We didn't end up with a second videotape format war.
We just had two competing ideas for how camcorders should be.
Folks who gravitated towards simplicity and compatibility would tend to choose VHS-C.
Pretty hard to beat "take tape from camera, put in adapter, watch on TV."
For those who envisioned using the camera for longer recording sessions or who perhaps really didn't want to pack a half dozen tapes on their trip to Europe,
there was Video8.
There wasn't a right or wrong answer!
There was just what made sense to you.
And so sales between the two were always pretty comparable.
As years passed, the 8mm format tended to see more tech-forward users, which honestly makes a ton of sense.
If you aren't expecting to play a camcorder's tapes in another device,
it's easier to accept the format changing with each new camcorder you might purchase.
And boy, did it change.
Some of you are probably more familiar with the successor to Video8, Hi8.
This revised format offered a resolution bump by using a new tape formulation,
which was impressive in itself, but also meant the quality degradation problem when copying onto a standard VHS tape was practically solved.
Hi8 would eventually go digital by sort of merging into the DV standard as Digital8.
And then eventually we got miniDV camcorders.
To the people who never cared for the ability to play the camcorder's tapes on a device which wasn't the camcorder,
all of these changes never came with any downsides.
And in the digital age, being able to offload raw data from the camcorder and onto your computer was pretty slick.
But to all those out there who just wanted to watch the tapes using the VCR they've always had and will always use,
VHS-C still had the upper hand.
It just worked.
And that meant it hung on for a lot longer than you might realize.
This here is an S-VHS-C camcorder which I bought in 2006, basically the last gasp of VHS.
Look, I was young and it was cheap.
The S stands for super and it's the same basic idea as Hi8, but S-VHS never really got much traction.
I should do a video on that someday.
But anyway, the fact that this device was on sale well into the existence of YouTube
shows that sometimes it's not what's technically best that matters.
It's what fits in your brain the nicest.
And the real trick is to figure that out for yourself before the sales team does.
♫ pragmatically smooth jazz ♫
There's some airc... aircraft traffic.
Airtraft craffic.
[belches]
...start over with a brand new format called Video8.
I'm holding it backwards.
All you... that was bad.
I... this, this...
Wow.
But the point of VHS-C... oh, I had that facing down?
Well, screw me.
It was only ever going to appeal to those who were...
farts.
Just pop the tape inside here...
and I [bleeped] that up.
Yeah, we're not going to do that.
That's not going to be demonstrated live.
Did you really just die on me?
Seriously?
Ugh, gravy.
[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Other than that bit, the YouTube auto-captions have gotten TONS better. There's punctuation now! So I just assigned timings and proofread from what it did. Man, progress at YouTube? Astounding.