Sharp's Zany Double Camera
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- čas přidán 12. 08. 2021
- I've been wanting to make a video about this camera for years. Now that I have one, I spent the entire time insulting it. Went to plan.
VWestlife's video (used with permission): • 1992 Sharp Twin Slimca...
The model number for the Hi8 version is a little unclear - in Japan it appears to be the VL-HX1, in the US I believe it was the VL-HX10, but I may be wrong. Info on these is thin.
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The Twincam seems like "The Homer" of camcorders. Some senior person at Sharp had a relative that had been begging to design a product and they did whatever that person said no matter how dumb.
that is EXACTLY what i wanted to say about it and forgot, hahaha, dangit!
D'oh! That could certainly be it...
Or it could be designed by committee.. we asked 1000 people type thing.. And it was multiple choice box ticking.. then the results landed on some designers desk with a lot of "it must be" parameters..
I was just recently introducing my children to the (good old) episodes of The Simpsons on Disney+ and: yes hello to the Homer car episode..
All comments on similarity between camcorder and car are best true!
@@CathodeRayDude Me Too!
I find it amusing that the NTSC one has an 'color viewfinder' while the PAL one has a 'colour viewfinder'.
It would have been much more amusing had it been the other way around.
Damn, you beat me to it.
We all know, only one of those things defines color or colour. You can call it whatever you want, NTS is never going to give you it twice :)
u know that u is important....hehe
I don't know what's amusing? if the PAL version is from the UK it is colour.
That was a great demo of the poor dynamic range of those cameras. Shooting in noon sun meant the person's eyes would be black holes and their cheeks would be overexposed. They made you appreciate the flat even light of cloudy days.
Yeah my gf was helping me shoot and she said "half your face is completely black" and I said "if it looked any other way I'd be lying, this is what these cameras looked like"
Open one of the broken ones and see if it’s littered with Sharp references inside!
Exactly what I was thinking. Internally there will likely be some more clues to the origin of this monster.
... Clever unintentional pun LMAO
Good you said broken. I tried opening similar cameras as a kid. One of the few devices that were hard to put back together.
There are so much parts in these things from that time.
@@MrSpacelyy cameras in general are a bitch to repair because of this. It's even worse today. Usually there's a very specific order to the dis- and reassembly of these.
"greebled" is EXACTLY the word that came to mind, holy shit
1. The design looks a little like japanese minidisc and hifis from sharp, so it might be targeted to their market.
2. The reason they built it is the same as today's multi-lens feature on modern phones. But back then it was the other way around. Everybody wanted to shoot from distance so zoom with a long focal length was a must. On the other hand this usually ruled out extra wide angle which is much more practical in Japan or Europe where spaces are tighter. If you wanted to have all the family in the frame it was either the wide converter or... this.
Oh yes, I did get a wide converter…
ooh, I have a Sharp MD-MS722 that looks like a slightly less shitty application of that design philosophy (it's metal, and they include a wheel that's actually useful for text input)
@@the-shork I came to post that the camera looked like that exact MD player! Still got mine hah
At the time people said Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic’s success in the west was because they understood how to tone down the designs for western sensibilities.
Sharp were often Japanese market leaders (or inventors of things, like LCD) and designed for Japanese and Asian markets first. That’s what this is.
Pretty sure I had a portable cd player that was the same colors and design
This thing looks like you have to tactically reload the batteries/tapes.
"It's really ugly" You take back those words, you charlatan! You knave! That is the most single perfect specimen of camcorder to ever possibly exist! Your mere mortal mind cannot comprehend it's forward looking aesthetic!
Well, now we have smartphones that feature 4 to 6 cameras and nobody laughs at that. Sharp made it long before it become mainstream.
Actually, the more you rag on the camera’s aesthetics,… the more I’m starting to really appreciate it’s aesthetics. It’s kind of wild that it made it through production in the first place.
The Sharp actually looks like they were trying to take design cues from professional TV cameras. The aesthetics of it look really similar to the one I operated for a while when I helped with the TV broadcast for a church we attended.
I honestly half-suspect that this was intended for small-budget TV crews. "This is Bob Boblinger, reporting from Farmer Dan's hay barn in back-country Nebraska, where he wants to speak with us about an exciting discovery in the world of manure."
Nice that it has a line input option. I hear that was quite a common feature elsewhere in the world, but it was a feature that was removed from nearly all UK versions. To do with the import tax I believe - if the camera had input sockets it was classed as a VCR, which meant more import tax had to be paid on it. Result - none but the most expensive UK camcorders had video input sockets.
I can't remember on the MX7, but certainly on the Viewcams, the video input was present but disabled in software. You could reprogram a UK spec (suffix H) machine to be Australian spec (suffix X, IIRC), which was identical apart from allowing external video input and recording.
That was a real bone of contention when mini-DV arrived, because UK models had DV input disabled in firmware (unless you bought the most expensive models). That led to an explosion in small specialist companies offering cracks to reprogram the firmware in your device to re-enable DV input. They weren't cheap either, I think I paid about £70 to get my first mini-DV camcorder (Panasonic NV-DA1) hacked for DV input, and that was the typical market rate.
I remember the hack arrived on a 3.5" floppy, and the label on it warned that if you tried to use it more than once, it would damage the camcorder, presumably by deliberately screwing up the firmware.
@@dunebasher1971 Presumably making a copy of the executable before running it would circumvent this? :)
@@dunebasher1971 I’m 85% sure they just said it, knowing that most people, especially back then, found this stuff daunting and inscrutable and would be scared off by such a threat
This is SOOOOO a Sharp "high end" product. Literally matches their TVs from the era
That's also the same technique used in 3D Modeling... By adding Details the occlusion effect is more noticeable therefore looking much more photorealistic when rendering.
Dude you cover some of the most interesting niche video tech on CZcams, thanks for taking the time to share this stuff. Still incredibly envious of that WVHS deck bruv, but happy it is in good hands.
As someone who was a young adult in that time, the purpose of the different look is to make it look like fancy equipment, and the reserved look of the other camcorders resembled "Cheap" products. You want fancy stuff, make it look fancy with all the "Different" "Metals", and gaudy designs. Basically, it was nothing more than a status statement of the times.
They "experiment" a lot of concept consumer products in Japan. Some are specific to the Japanese customer market. I have seen cell phone models that were never sold outside of Japan back in the 90's.
J-Phone and NTT DoCoMo
Exactly what I needed to brighten up a tough, disappointing, tiring day. I find your voice really relaxing, as well as the content interesting.
come on now, we all know this just some very clever VFX, as if any company would release such a bizarre product (secretly I want one just so I can take it apart and strap the bits to my head then run around pretending to be a Borg)
I'm 46 and think it looks cool and from the future lol a lot better than the boring black thing.
Same here! It conveys a "Steampunk" vibe and feel. If only the buttons were metallic and copper. I can't really down on it because it comes from an era of gaudy.
A lot of electronics of the 90s had that techie feel. But while it has a lot going against it, it has features that were not widely available in the 90s.
I always had the feeling that 1990s Sharp (and Casio) had products that, instead of being released, just escaped from the R&D department. Like someone from Marketing walked in to the R&D department, saw something fancy but very unfinished and demanded a working marketable product within three months.
Maybe they bought an OEM shell (modified for two lenses) and crammed their tech in it?
This idea, given a bit more thought, would be quite nice. It could have become a nice digital sports finder, where you had a wide angle view of the whole scene and a pip view of the actual frame, so you could see things happen out of view without getting your eyes off the viewfinder.
When you said, "escaped" I pictured someone forgetting to close the window before they left for the day and the thing got out the window and onto store shelves.
Point of reference: $1,700 USD in 1992 would be the equivalent to over $3,300 USD in "today's money".
I'd play with it at Circuit City or Incredible Universe, but that's about it.
8:53 - curious P in P function: The only reason I can think of why this might have been useful is that back in the day, some of us (old guys who used to own camcorders and sometimes used them in a more advanced manner) used to occasionally set up an ad hoc studio at home, taping something while monitoring it on a TV set attached to the composite jacks. In such a setup, a PiP that showed a close-up of the focal point of the video and could be moved from left to right, could almost make sense with the video in progress being monitored on a bigger screen. Still, I have to admit, it's a barely useful and underwhelming implementation of PiP. It really smacks of a feature added mainly because someone was trying to figure out what to do with an otherwise unused spot on the side of the camcorder.
I *had* one of these when I was in high school! It was amazing. So many edit-in-camera options. The audio quality on the thing was astounding. I had the opposite reaction to the aesthetics at the time. :)
Growing up in the tail end of the DV era, i like the look of a silver camcorder with way too many buttons lol
I'll be honest, I like the look of it.
All those buttons and dials makes it look super high-tech. The guy behind that thing knows what he's doing!
I remember having a go on one of these way back when they were a thing & the process of lining up wide & tele lenses “ on the fly” seemed much like spinning plates whilst unicycling.Kudos for thinking outside the box even if actual use was insanely awkward. Love your video. Very best wishes.
External PIP would have been hugely complex due to synchronising the video signals. PIP between two CCDs was easier because they would have been running from the same timing source.
The big TwinCam looks like a Panasonic product with that swinging viewfinder.
Twelve-year-old me was obsessed with this camcorder when it was advertised on the Home Shopping Club (now HSN).
I distinctly recall a demonstration video in which a boy was batting in a baseball game. The wide shot showed him standing at the plate, while a close-up shot of his face was superimposed. I found this _incredibly_ cool.
My recollection is that the unit cost only about $100 (about $200 in today's money) more than an otherwise-similar single-lens Sharp camcorder.
dude i love your channel. this is the real spirit of youtube. what it always was meant to be. broadcasting yourself and the things you like to talk about. beeing yourself no matter of audience size, and talking about things that matter to yourself are qualities that are rare these days. instead of pandering to the audience to encurage growth you just do what you like to do.
i envy you, bravo!
This is the type of camera you'd see in 90's anime. It fits the time period from that perspective.
10:00 A PiP input would require a digital frame sync, and those were very expensive at that time. The two sensors in the camera are already genlocked, so they don't need a frame sync.
That camera is a modern art masterpiece.
I worked for a Sharp service agent in the UK between 1993-1994, just as the Viewcam range was launched.. We had lots of MX7's come in for warranty repair, and also the cheaper VL-M4 that had a tiny B&W CRT viewfinder and a built-in video light in place of the second lens. I still have my old VL-H400H Viewcam in the loft somewhere. Thanks for the memories!
How many capacitors does the VL-MX7 have? and How many of its circuit boards have SMD caps on them? I'm asking because I just got one recently and want to save it from the recycle bin. Does its circuitry look exactly like the VL-M4? and in advance I know there's a disassembly video on it.
the p-in-p seems "useful" for sports; zoom in to see the individual player, while recording the entire field of play on the wide.
conceptually yeah, although I think it would be unspeakably difficult to make that look good, haha
@@CathodeRayDude What looked good in the 90s is definitely different from what looks good now (I'm old). Back then I bet people would see that awkward magnifying box on the screen showing a close up of their child's face in a big school auditorium and think it was incredible, just like we thought the star-swipe was incredible.
That was my thought, too. Put this on a tripod up high in the stands at a high school football game. You can catch the snap with a zoom, then switch to the wide angle to see where the receivers go.
It seems so perfect for this use case -- on paper at least -- that I'm surprised that you found no marketing materials that suggested it.
I love you man, you're the most wonderful nerd I've ever had the pleasure of consuming the content of. I hope you continue to be as excellent far into the future!
That chunky "greebling" looks cool. It'd be at home in any cyberpunk dystopia, especially with the extra lens too.
I reflexively clicked the Like button 2 seconds in, because I was so excited to be among the first people to see a new CRD video! :D
I've now seen the whole video and it was delightful. Thank you.
hahahaha, thank you!
90`s tech assimilated by the Borg
Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think it’s beautiful. I love it’s aesthetic. In fact, the “contemporary” camcorder is ugly to me.
I'm with you on that. Looks great!
I like it too, it's hilarious looking
I agree about the aesthetic comparison but with that said I would rather have the sleeker one because I would feel goofy actually using the dual lense
As a prop it looks pretty cool. As a tool, a bit too much.
I love it
I bought one of these in the 80's and I still have it. It was pretty interesting the way you could do wide angle to zoom fades with the two cameras.
Gotta love VWestlife is his treasure trove of random older vintage electronics!
Oh man, seeing that Sharp camera takes me back! My mom had a unit like that, and being able to hold it up and tilt the screen down was awesome when you needed an eagle eye shot. A lot easier than the handicam, even the models with the side screens.
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
BFG9000 was the very first thought I had when I saw it on screen. Great review, love the content!
According to the New York Times article "When TV Is A Snap" from 1992, it was $1699 at launch.
"A notable innovation in the ever-popular camcorders is Sharp's 8-millimeter Twin-Cam (Model VL-MX7U). Unlike other video cameras intended for home use, it has two separate lenses instead of the usual single lens. The dual-lens feature brings to home video advantages long enjoyed by photographers using interchangable lenses. The options for pictorial composition -- and thus creative expression -- are thus considerably expanded.
One of the two lenses is a zoom lens so powerful (12x) that it can take extreme close-ups even from a distance. The other is a wide-angle lens that produces panoramic images. If desired, images from both lenses can be taped simultaneously, with a close-up appearing as an insert in a wide-angle long shot.
Further refinements, like stereo sound and a color viewfinder, make the list price of $1,699 seem almost reasonable." (NYT, "When TV Is A Snap", 9/27/1992)
The other issue with zooming was that if you were using the built in mic you almost always had to suffer through several seconds of very loud motor noise recorded on the audio track.
I remember this one when it came out - it managed to impress me back in the day. BTW, this was styled to look like 8mm film gear. And it does look quite bit like a bolex-paillard film projector, although much cheesier.
Me and my brother used a Sharp ViewCam when we were kids for making lots of dumb videos. But it gave us experience to later create our (mildly) successful youtube channel in 2009. I loved that thing even though it was weird lol
Ooh, take it apart, the caps will tell you who made it. Panasonic uses panasonic caps, Sony uses Elna caps, etc.
And all those caps are equally shitty now :D
Glue some nonfunctioning gears to it and call it steampunk.
god does it even need them, it's already there hahaha.
Damn! Just scrolled down to your comment about 3 minutes after posting mine. Kudos for beating me to it!
I really enjoy the editing you do on these, like at
8:03 when you say "I never really liked the look of zooming" and instantly zooms out ^^
oh the engineering meetings regarding having PinP must have been a fun
thank you for the glorious two of them reference
i didn't realize I'd made that perfect layout until I was editing and realized what I'd done. i added the image and almost brought tears to my eyes. it was so perfect. i'm so glad i had this opportunity
A lot of capacitors from the 80s-90s died very rapidly because the original recipe for them was lost and an incorrect copy of it was used by manufacturers for a while until the original concoction was rediscovered
I absolutely love how this thing looks!
Looks like "twin cam" is only good in engines.
Please keep making videos. Your videos are calming to watch.
I cheered when you said “greebled” because it was the first word that came to mind for me as well
Holy crap, that DS9 Romulan senator clip took me _waaaaay_ back
It's a work of art.
It's funny that you threw out that toy company theory. When you introduced the camera I was reminded of the Talkboy from the 90s.
my cat loves your videos; he always wants to attack your hands while you're talking
if we're speculating, what if the weird one was made to fund the proper one? i think you may be right about a foreign market, and they may have released a cheap version to figure out the kinks and then patched it. after it proved itself to be a successfull product they could have used the revenue to redesign it for the american market, which was already common practice for asian companies like nintendo with the famicom/nes.
In my work back in the day we loved the viewcam form factor. You could even use it like a mini LCD TV since the AV cable worked like in and out at same time. It was sad day when Sharp exits the country.
I am learning so many new words from this guy!
The little Twincam *screams* Sharp to me. The brown gold color and that font are the EXACT ones on my Sharp CRT. All those fiddly extra and the cyborg toy look? That's because it's SUPER PROFESHONIL
I love the design of the twincam SO MUCH. 😂❤️ It's so extra!
Actually I'm capturing a video made in the 90's with this camera and transferred to S-VHS, from some friends that played rock music and I have to say that, besides the poor quality of the video 8 image, the camera had the ability to change between the lenses in real time, and have one of them focusing the whole scene, while the other could be offering a close shot of it, which you could monitor previously through the viewfinder, and make the change, say, when the guitar solo began, and have the guitarist instantly on close-up, even allowing some kind of basic graphic transitions between both images. And the built-in mic sounded pretty good too, with a surprising stereo image. I borrowed it from a friend and I have no clue what happened to it, but it was a nice toy that has brought me nice memories...
I get a strong impression that this was designed by Sharp to be a prop for Kevin McCallister, like the weird Talkboy in Home Alone 2. (But Sharp made a weird twin boombox also called a Twin Cam so I dunno.)
This video inspires me! Thanks for posting!
that lens cap pop is spicy . I could imagine it being a focus point of tv ads at the time
It looks like something made for the japanese domestic market, but was somehow sold in the rest of the world. They really used to like that kind of weird robot buttons everywhere kinda design.
Yeah I thought the same... so much Japanese products made only for the home market looks weird and wonderful unlike what they sold to the rest of the world. This was probably just one of those that got sold elsewhere
8:40, but the white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone!
I faintly remember seeing this camera for sale in 1 or 2 issues of the Damark catalog (Remember those?) circa 1993 or 1994.
Don't remember the price though.
I loved the Damark catalog
Maybe they bought a company and were contractually obligated to put out the other models.
Endlessly pleased at "greebled". Just perfect
Have you considered sending the other twin cam to Mr Carlson's lab or bigclive as a collab to get it working?
A collab like that would be awesome 😎
Greebling should be a universally implemented style of electronics design.
There was a camcorder for sale here in Japan a few years ago that had a separate inward pointing lens with its own sensor for putting a pip of the dad filming with camera while reacting to his child enjoying a birthday cake or running around at the yearly sports festival.
6:37 The picture took me back to a very cool time in my life, reminded me of home videos with the old man and his mates when they just discovered camcorders. We would film fishing, the beach trips (which damaged the cams because of sand).
Camera looking like a late game Binding of Issac character
So you are a master of presentation now. What if you put retro technology into the context of autobiography. Maybe I'm projecting, but why is this so damn interesting?
The only camcorder I've ever seen that looks anything like this is the fictional one Laserbeak turns into in Transformers Armada
Love the dog show b roll for the pip!
I like when you say things are things on things in trench coats.
Honestly i love this camera i think its truly beautiful
The design of it kind of actually reminds me of one of those 8mm cameras with multiple lenses. Those looked really cool. This could have looked really cool, but it doesnt.
I think you're right. They were going for some kind of nostalgia slightly throwback design, with a turret lens look. That old 8mm film cameras had. Probably the only people who could afford this camera were older folks who were in the prime years of making bank on evey paycheck tell retirement in a few short years. Or had just retired and have money to spend to make videos with their grandchildren now. They remember when cameras looked like this Sharp in their youth.
Back in the day high quality injection molding cost a fortune, and the Twincam has a ton of parts. I am guessing Sharp sold the electronics and parts to a 3rd party company who then made the case.
My bet is they put one of their bookshelf stereo industrial designers in charge of the aesthetics. There was a lot of "make it look powerful and futuristic" design posturing starting to happen at that time.
You're a great narrator. I could listen to you read the back of a shampoo bottle and be wholly entertained for hours.
That's some star wars, futuristic, high-tech gadget thing design that looks like it shoots lasers.
Me, a wealthy adult: "This thing looks cool AF, I want one!"
Me, after watching this video: "Am I a child?"
I learned a new word in my native language today! "Greebled" is so fun to say! Thank you! 😊
I actually like the "greebled" design of the camera, I think it fits with the dual camera barrels.
Darn, I love how the AV connector flap is just held shut by that round sleeve popping onto the white chinch plug…
the cam footage has excellent 'last known image before the incident' vibes
1:23 it looks neat, could use it as a prop in some sci-fi movie ha
1:49 ha
This design reminds me of mid-90's to mid-2000's hi-fi systems that looked like spaceships!
I love it because of that!
It’s an early example of the ‘Y2K aesthetic’ in a way, and very Japanese.