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The big change came in 1987 when I purchased my first video camera.
It was a
second-hand full-sized Hitachi and the great novelty with this was that you did
not have to send the film away for processing. As it was a full-sized camera it
took the full-sized video cassettes, so you could take the cassette out of the camera, place
it in the home video recorder and watch it on television. Amazing.
Unfortunately the camera failed after a few months and I decided to purchase
a new one. This was a Panasonic and cost around £1000 at the time.
I also needed things like an effects console,
a sound mixer-editor, titler.... the
list goes on... I spent a fortune!!!
It was not long before my 'tapespondents' started talking about how we could
send video letters rather than just sound-tapes.... say no more.. There I was, in
the late 80's, early 90's, sending video letters to many countries around the
world. The big problem here was that America was on this thing called 'NTSC
FORMAT' which I new nothing about and did not understand. There was also Betamax,
which according to a lot of people was of much higher quality than VHS, but
it died a death. Anyway I could not send video's to the United States and some other
countries because of this format problem.
It was at about this time that I had to do something about batteries for the
camera. They were quite big and costly and only lasted about 20 minutes, they
also had a memory problem if you did not fully discharge them each time. On my
visits to steam railways I would film for over an hour so I purchased a battery
belt.... Wow! Now I was really going places! YES, off I went one day, 90 miles to
the Severn Valley Railway. Full-sized camera, tripod, chest-pod, sandwiches, flask
etc.. I arrived at 7.00am after leaving home at 5.30am, so that I could get all the
early shed action. I sat in the car, had bacon sandwiches, and nice cup of tea.
Right, lets get going then. Got the tripod, got the camera, got the battery
belt, great stuff, until I found that the lead to connect the belt to the camera
was still at home on the dining room table!!!!.... I could not bring myself to look
at a locomotive. I put my tail between my legs and drove the 90 miles back home
with nothing. I purchased another belt and another lead and ALWAYS kept one
fully charged in the car. As a matter of interest belts cost £89.90.
VHSc format was my next camera. It was a JVC-GRS 99E model followed by
the 505EK model... Cost £1130.00.
I remember seeing black bits when I looked through the viewfinder and really
believed that these would show up on the actual film. I paid a retailer (who
shall remain nameless) £25.00 to remove these black bits. Later, I learned that all I
had to do was to remove the eyepiece and clean it..... and even today I still don't read
instruction books!!
While I am on the subject of prices. In 1990 I purchased
two Mitsubishi B52
video recorders for £1000.00.
In 1994, I purchased a Panasonic video recorder for
£480.00
In 1999, I purchased a Samsung multi-standard video recorder with a retail
price tag of £999.00. I paid £699.00 for it and of course this solved all my
problems with trying to send video tapes to the United States and anywhere else for
that matter.
Of course computing had really taken off by now and my video/tape pals were
either losing interest or passing to another life. I had no interest in
computing whatsoever but things were about to change yet again after the
Millennium.
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