My thoughts exactly! Next thing we know Nostalgia Nerd will restore a Dell and Modern Vintage Gamer will quit talking about emulation. Or better yet Technology Connections will stop making puns! Like what?
I've got one of these! I remember getting it for $89 and having a "massive" 2GB purple/blue SD card in it. I believe our family got it for christmas and we used it for home movies and I used it to record my chemistry experiments which I'd edit with windows movie maker and upload to Metacafe because youtube wasn't a thing/popular yet.
That camera was one of the reasons I majored in cinema! Literally went back to my parents' house and made a little video with it last night, for nostalgic purposes. Good stuff!
Hey 8 Bit guy: Thanks so much, I bought one (the pocket DV4100M) for $5 and enjoy it for what it does (even so it was quite a bit of engineering for the time). Mine uses a 2 gig SanDisk not an SD card. By the way, I enjoyed your presentation so very much, and as a result appreciate this little camera even more. Thanks Rudolph
that one clip of you pushing your daughter on the swing while she laughed made me glad you were able to have footage of thinsg most people wouldnt have been able to capture back then
My how things have changed. I've been a Hollywood Audio/Video engineer for 30 years and at 8:10 or so what you are seeing is called "4th frame repeat." The camera is actually shooting at 24 frames per second and creating 30 fps. Since, in this era NTSC TV's were all 30 fps (29.97fps) you needed some way to get from 24 frames per second to the 30 that was necessary to play on an NTSC TV. Feature films are shot typically at 24 frames per second and when they were transferred for use on TV, VHS, DVD etc they go through a process called "telecine" (before solid state storage that transfer often happened to that big D1 component digital video tape you have in your "Rare Media" video - the SD1 you had was the data version but essentially the same as the D1 tape used for video transfers - I worked for a company that, at the time, did a fair bit of the special effects in the movie "Independence Day" and the D1 tapes that stored all the data for the SFX shots in that movie filled a small warehouse storage space...but I digress). The telecine process takes the 24 fps source and splits each frame into fields, and then repeats those fields in a specific (called 3:2 as it was a sequence of three fields and tw fields) order such that 4 film frames resulted in 5 video frames, or the conversion between 24 frames per second to 30 frames per second. However, this process, especially at that time was difficult to do digitally, so the "down and dirty" solution is to simply repeat every fourth frame resulting in 5 frames at 30 fps for every 4 at 24 fps. The result isn't as smooth motion as you get from a proper telecine process, but it works and is cheap to do. Even edit systems like Final Cut Pro would do the same thing if you just dropped a 24 fps video clip into a 30 fps timeline and Apple used to make a special tool to proprocess all of your 24 fps footage to use at 30 fps with proper 3:2 conversion. These days there are many more options for frame interpolation, etc when you need to change the frame rate.
My first digital camera was actually the first version of this Aiptek, sold as "DV3300" by LIDL back in 2003 in Europe. Almost exactly the same shape, but took 4 AA batteries, had just 2 MP, and video compression was MJPEG, which meant it ate SD space pretty fast. Came with a measly 64 MB SD card back then, which I eventually expanded as cards got cheaper. There was a "SVGA" mode as well, which however sacrificed frame rate. Normally it was 24 fps for regular VGA quality videos. Was about 150 Euros at the time, which seemed like a bargain, and got a lot of use out of it, until I got a real 7 MP camera also by LIDL in 2007.
I have a Panasonic camcorder that uses mini DV cassette AND it also uses SD card. You can use both to record video. The SD card is mainly used for stills instead if having to search through the mini DV to find your photos. I still use it! Was a lot of money when I purchased it (2003). Still works amazing and fit in the palm of my hand.
I've never commented on it before, I suppose it's because although I've watched a few of your videos in the past I've only recently subscribed, but, your intro and outro music are the BEST! ;)
Back in time with this video, i think i still have that exact model at home as i had one of them. And its true the photos where better than all competition haha
I enjoy seeing these types of videos. I find it amazing to see how far we have come in imaging tech. I would add that even big name camera companies have deceived people on video capture of the actual resolving resolutions. Both Nikon and Canon early video DSLRs did not actually have HD 1080p resolution. Some could only resolve 480p and wrap that in a 720p or 1080p file. I think thats a crime considering how much people pay for DSLRs cameras and the lenses to get the best image quality. Thankfully today they are a lot better especially with the mirrorless cameras options.
My aunt bought the SONY DSC-P73 camera back in 2005 when she visited London and that camera had a 4mp sensor and 640x480 resolution video and the video was similar in quality like your old camcorder.
I had this camera. For the same reasons you mentioned, I wouldn't cry if it were dropped and we got a lot of friends and family footage also because of that fact. Bar the dropped frames I was generally impressed. It was as good video as a VHS-C camcorder bar a slightly less fluid image. Pictures, apart from muted colours like you say looked great for the price point, also Mpeg 4 was so new this was an amazing feat. In reality it took a hiding and survived amazingly well. The lack of focus was a blessing, auto-focus until recently was woeful at best. I only recently found it again, sadly batteries had leaked so I ripped it apart and kept the sensor and lens as a memoir.
Eagle talons are a sorta collector car for the guys who love the old Chrysler and Mitsubishi alliance back in the 80s/90s, the DSM cars as their affectionately known.
From 2008-2011ish I had two Aiptek camcorders. I those to Disney world, sleepovers, made stopmotion with them, filmed all my youtube videos from that time on them. Sadly I have very little of the content I made back then
Fun fact for those not in the know: VLC can do a lot more than play video. You can stream video from websites (seems to half work for RU-vid, or at least for me anyways) and you can also convert video/audio formats using it too, which means you don't have to download the (often) garbage freeware off of dodgy sites on the internet to convert like an AVI to MP4 (which these programs convert really badly and the video looks awful afterwards) or whatever else you wanna convert.
This makes me miss my old Sony bloggy. I loved those niche entery level budget electronic consumer products the phone nowadays replaced alot of devices like so... I remember me and my dad argued about if phones would take over and I argued people will love dedicated products....... Lol
I bought a similar device around 2006 for $100...I can't remember the brand name now and I don't know where it is, but at the time it was pretty impressed by it, because it could record at 720p for hours, whereas my digital camera at the time only did about 480p for up to 30 seconds. I then got a new digital camera in 2012 that could record 1080p video with no time limit, rendering the camcorder redundant. Funny to think the mid 2000s technology is already vintage!
That video is quite acceptable. My 1st digital still cam was a 1.3mp Kodak, and all the videos are junk. I even converted some Super8 on a flat bed scanner that came out better than the Kodak.
It's nice to nice on how old school Camcorders worked. I recently picked up a Samsung SC-DC173U DVD Camcorder for $5. But the only problem is that I need to pick up a AC Adpater for it and potentially a new 🔋
Aiptek was doing some great things. I still have a few of mine. One feature was the ability to use it as an external video recorder. I used one as a solid-state recorder with a $40,000 professional betacam rig. FYI, try upconverting those small video files with Topaz Video Enhance AI, you might be pleasantly surprised.
I bought in 2004 the Nikon E-3700 digital camera. I specifically chose that model because it was able to make excellent videos for that time 30fps in 640x480. It had one big advantage over camcorders at that time, that people would not recognize as a filming device. This allowed me to film stuff that I could not have filmed otherwise (I have the whole birth of my son on camera) and people would also stay natural. Nothing is more annoying than the people who don't want to be filmed because they think they look silly on video, but do not realize that they are silly because they don't want to be on the film. My SIL is particularly annoying in that regard, and it was only in that period of time that I have nice footage of family reunions where she looks natural and genuine.
l like the video quality. it has a neat effect to it, it makes it look like an old film camera, just put some artificial static in the screen and nobody would know the difference.
You can calculate the maximum real optical resolution of the camera at the focal plane from the f-ratio of the lens and the wavelength of light, then apply the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem to express this in terms of megapixels for a given size of sensor. Thus, for example, if the lens aperture is set at f/8, then the thinnest line at the focal plane will be about 10.7 µm wide. If we then assume that the sensor size is, for example, 1/2.5", then that is 5.76 x 4.29 mm, and hence the maximum possible resolution expressed in pixels is about 540 x 400 = 2.16 megapixels. It is impossible to do better than this.
Hey, it's 480p at 24fps! Sure, it's a bit washed out, and the audio makes weak AM radio sound good, but for the dawn of the RU-vid era, _that's revolutionary_. I remember making and uploading videos at half that resolution. So that camera would actually have been pretty impressive ten years ago. What's really amazing is that technology leaps like that once took a century. Then 30 years. And now, for LESS than the cost of that camera, just about anyone can have a device that can do just what that camera did AND a few hundred other things. And yet we hardly think about it! Truly, the future is only awesome until it becomes the present.
I had one like this as a kid back in '07, but I think it might've been an earlier version with a CompactFlash card. Video quality is exactly as I remember.
I genuinely remember wanting to make films as 10 year old, and constantly scouring for a camera that would be both practical and economical, so that it could be bought for me. Looking back I realise what a sink hole of technology the 2005 era was D: I now have one less regret in life. Thanks 8-BIt Guy. 37,643 to go!
i like how 8 bit guy doesn't fill his videos with ego stroking bullshit he's got a very simple formula and it works. 1: hi i got some cool shit 2: here's the cool shit 3: here's some cool shit about the cool shit 4: here's some additional cool shit 5: see you next time for more cool shit it's great.
Sony DVD camcorders date to around 2003 (as does Panasonic's D-Snap line of camcorders--they record to SD cards and record something like full resolution camcorder video at 480i). Granted, the D-Snap cameras would *ONLY* take video to Panasonic cards (and I can only find a 512MB card which came packed with the camera, I imagine separately they were probably stupid expensive in 2003).
I suspect AIPTEK was bought out by Vivitar. I have a Vivitar unit bought in 2013 from Big Lots. While the form factor is different, it still has the pop out video screen, runs on a couple AA batteries, and has the same software and graphics for the system settings. The price at that time was below $35.
These are white-label products by an unknown OEM. Vivitar, Mustek, Aiptek, Jay-Tech, and a number of other brands have sold these identical products. Vivitar is now a Chinese-owned brand, but Aiptek is not part of the group and hasn't been. Aiptek's German subsidiary is still around too, selling Chinese pico projectors identical to the ones you'll find on Ali, but with a hefty markup. Seems to be winding down though, the eBay store is closed and a number of resellers no longer carry them.
Interesting, so this launched at the start of the SD card camcorder craze which really took off with the Flip camcorders in 2006 or 2007! I had a Kodak Zi8 in 2008 or 2009 and while the video was already 16:9 and some sort of HD, the main problem just like here were the missing optical stabilization and rolling shutter artifacts. Digital video was finally accessible for the masses but back then I really had trouble getting usable footage.
I'm surprised you didn't go more into the fact that digital still cameras have had similar 640x480 video modes since the early 2000s. I took a lot of videos in 2002 on early digital still cameras that seem to have equal video and much better audio than the device reviewed here.
they weren't cheap devices though. even point and shoots costed some bucks. i had a canon that could do such things but it held a $500 price tag. this thing being reviewed, while being a turd, was cheap on the retail market.
My first experience with this brand was back when they still only made drawing tablets, like the kind that plug into a computer. I thought about getting one, but in those days all the off-brand ones used fat, heavy styluses that took AAA batteries, so that was a no-go. And then my dad ended up buying this camera, or one very similar to it, for my little brother.
Ha had the pocket dv11. Never been more disappointed. My dad back then had the choice of a ps2 or that with some deal. Even back then I thought the quality was pap.
I had a similar model. The only difference I saw is that mine had a tilt-able screen and the screen may have been larger. But mine murdered batteries! It had like a 15 minute run time!
Yo I got this exact same camera for Christmas 2008 when I was in fifth grade. It’s crazy seeing a video made about it. I had some great times with this camera and basically just recorded dumb shit with my friends
At one point I had an AIPTEK HD camera similar to that. It used a smaller proprietary battery. The rolling shutter on it was pretty bad though. It's probably in my basement somewhere still. I'll have to break it out someday and see if it still works.
Starting to think that the way he picks things to look at in his videos is by just asking himself “what other old stuff do I have lying around my house?” Lol.
OMG Nostalgia! I had 2 similar Aiptek Cameras and i think one of them is still working. It's from 2008 and really cheap crappy quality. But it was so cool when i was 12 :D
at that time I had a Cybershot series from Sony Ericsson which recorded in 480p mp4, too bad my memory stick went corrupt before I could back up the contents and after that I didn't record any video just took a bunch of photos
That camera is decent quality quality. Decent frame rate, audio quality is poor, but audible (at least in a controlled environment. My old laptop had a webcam with 3 FPS...
2:30 Not true, there weren't many and most of them were closer to pdas, thus typically all smart phones of the time were called pda phones, anyway there were a few earlier devices I can't remember the name of but have a look at the Samsung SCH-i730 made in 2003 it was one of the more notable smartphones of its time, it ran windows phone 2003 (with an upgrade to 2005) and had every major feature we enjoy on our modern phones such as a touch screen, bluetooth, wifi, 2G egde for data, a web browser and although it didn't have an app store, it even had the ability to install apps on it similar to how you install an apk on android, it was a pretty feature packed phone for 2003 and it wasn't slow either.
You could use ffmpeg to convert the container with mpeg4 passthrough. The software you were using probably did a re-encode lowering the quality even further. Not that it would be that much better lol.
I don't think I would have bought this camera, since I'm much more interested in still photography than video anyway and, even in 2004, there were better options, but I still far prefer using a dedicated pocket camera to using a smartphone for daily photography and the occasional video and I am dismayed the non-phone pocket camera options are dwindling. I mainly use a Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS (know as the "IXUS 95 IS" in Japan) from 10 years ago since it takes great shots for a camera smaller than a deck of cards and, unlike a smart phone, it fits easily in the front pocket of my jeans and I don't have to worry about smashing the screen since it's behind a hard piece of plastic. (I also have a different Canon which has both a wider lens and a much longer zoom than the SD1200 but I prefer the image quality of the SD1200, at least for daylight shots.)
