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hello! in a previous episode i did a review of thefisher price pixelvision camera and i immediately got a ton of emails saying “david, you shouldalso do a review on the tyco video camera,†which was also another type of kids toy cameraand well, here it is! and, i actually bought this several monthsago and i’m just now getting around to actually doing something with it. so, let’s dig right into this thing. so, this is the tyco videocam. it came out in 1996, almost a decade afterthe fisher price camera.
as you can see it is shaped more like a handicamfrom the 1990s. there is no screen in the viewfinder, it’sjust a straight through lens to help you aim. this slide switch turns it on, and you cansee the led light up. it has a tripod mount on the bottom.. and it has a lens cap on the front, and youcan see it is a fixed focus lens. it runs on 6 double a batteries, but can alsobe powered by an a/c adapter. but where is the record media? well, it doesn’t have any. the idea behind the camera is that you’dplug it into your vcr.
it just needs a 1/8 inch phone jack to rcacable like this. and you would connect one end here to thecamera, and the other end to the line-input in your vcr. of course, i’ll need to insert a vhs tapeso that i can record a little sample for you. so, i was curious to know the original costof this camera, but after searching for hours on google and looking through old catalogsfrom toys r us and radio shack and places like that, i just came up empty. one reason i was hoping to find it in a radioshack catalog is due to the manual. if you look at the last page it actually suggestsa replacement for the 20 foot cable using
a radio shack part number. looking on some old discussion forums, i dida few mentions from people saying that they had originally bought the camera for $50 andanother person said they bought it for $100. either one of those could have been correct,or both of them could have been correct depending on the time they bought it. so, while looking through those catalogs ialso wanted to see what the cost was of a typical camcorder at the time. this radio shack catalog shows several camcorderscosting between $800 and $1,000. so even if this was sold for $100, that wasprobably not a bad deal to get your child
the ability to record their own videos. i’ll set up the camera on this tripod hereand connect the camera’s line output to the vcr. that way i can record some authentic vhs samplesfor you to watch. ok, so this is what the tyco cam looks likewhen its hooked up here in my studio. now, obviously the first thing you’ll noticeis that it’s black and white. and you’ll probably also notice that it’sa bit blurry. you might want to attribute that to the factthat this is being recorded to vhs tape and being played back.
but, that’s not exactly all of the reasonwhy. i also wanted to take a moment to let youhear what it would sound like. this is actually. this section here is coming right from themicrophone on the tyco camera rather than my overhead microphone that i was using justa minute ago. so, see what you think of that. for this next test, i’ll use this laptopand a usb video capture device. i’ll unplug the camera from the vcr andpipe its video directly to the video capture instead.
ok, so in this test, i am recording straightto this laptop computer that i have setting down here rather than to the vcr. and, in a moment, i’m going to take somestill frames from this and we can kind of compare side by side between the vcr and thedirect capture to see what kind of difference there really is. well, here are the two frames. and looking at them side by side, i can justbarely tell any difference. i think because the image is so soft to beginwith and the fact that there is no color signal, it works really well with vhs tape.
i can see a bit of a jagged edge due to theinterlacing on the sides of my face, that is visible on the vhs copy but not on thedirect capture. the camera also comes with this little tripod. it has these little extendable legs. they’re actually kind of hard to get out,but there we go. you can connect the camera up like this, andwell, that’s how that works. i mean, i guess it was okay for an includedaccessory. since it uses a standard mount, you couldhave always bought a real tripod at some place like wal-mart or target that would have beena lot better.
it also comes with this 20 foot bright yellowextension cable. and, one of the nice things about the tripodis that it has a little area designed for you to wrap the excess cable around and presumablyyou would wrap all of it around this for storage. and once you’ve done that, it all goes intothis little carry bag, which is pretty cool. i wanted to take some footage just aroundthe house, to see how the lighting and dynamic range are where there is less light than inmy studio, after all that’s what kids would have been expected to deal with back then. now, what’s interesting about this is thatit almost looks like i’m filming in the dark, but the lights are on in the livingroom and to be honest i have pretty bright
led lights. i have better lighting in my office room solet me show you some of my collectibles… that is except for this irritating tanglethat i got, i suspect this was a common issue. now that that is fixed, let’s try it again. even in here it almost looks like i’m filmingwith the lights off, despite it being very bright in this room. by the way, this is a tandy model 4p somebodyrecently donated, and then there’s an osborne one i recently picked up for $60 that needsa little restoration work, which you’ll probably see soon.
and i also got a bunch of tandy color computerstuff too. let’s see what starlight is up to. she likes looking out the window. speaking of, the camera really likes thatsun light! so i decided to try some outdoor video. of course, i’m not going to carry the darnedvcr around with me at the park, so i brought my laptop. i tried taking some footage straight fromthe bench here. it’s actually quite bright and for the firsttime i feel it has some real dynamic range.
but it is still not a very sharp image. and of course the irony here is that i doubtit was ever intended to be used outdoors considering it required a vcr to be connected at all times. next i got out the long 20 foot cable so icould get up and move around a bit. one thing i notice looking at this footageis that the grass and trees are very bright, which suggests to me that this thing is pickingup a lot of infrared. so, when i got home i decided to try lookingat an infrared remote control. and holy cow! boy is this camera sensitive to infrared light!
it’s so sensitive, i can use this tv remoteas a flash light! in fact, let me try turning the light offin the room. wow, look at that. take a look at this clip where i shine itstraight into the camera. let’s do a still frame of that. i’ve never seen a pattern like this beforewhen a ccd has a glare from a bright light source… but the it occurred to me that thismight be a result of the rapid flashing of the led that is actually sending a binarysignal to the tv. so i tried using just a regular flash lightinstead to see what it does.
and it appears i was correct about the flashing,but it also appears this camera cuts out to black when there is a huge over exposure,which is weird. so, one of the things i now wonder about isif maybe the reason that some of the scenes look so dark is because this camera prefersinfrared light. and since my entire house pretty much hasled lighting, i don’t have much infrared light. and, when i think about it, this camera wasmade during a time when practically everyone used incandescent lighting. to test this out, i took the camera over tomy parents house.
my parents are one of the last few holdoutsstill using incandescent bulbs. and it turns out my hunch was correct. this kitchen, for example, actually looksreally bright! what is really telling about this scene isthat to the human eye, this living room is much darker than mine, but to the camera itappears much brighter. one other thing i wanted to point out is aboutthe viewfinder. it’s really not very accurate as to whatyou are recording. in fact, if you look at this still frame hereof what the camera was recording, i’ll overlay a little box showing what you would see ifyou were looking through the viewfinder.
so this is what your eyes would see when recording,but this is what the camera would actually be recording. i also wonder how many people noticed thatthe camera has a bad pixel? see, it’s right here. i didn’t want to mention it earlier in thevideo because i knew you’d be staring at it the whole time if you noticed it rightaway. so what do i think of the tyco video camera? well, if it really did sell for $50 back in1996, then there’s not really a lot i could complain about.
even i find myself wanting to compare thiscamera to the fisher price pixel vision camera that i reviewed a few months back, but it’snot really a fair comparison because that camera came out in the 1980s and this cameout almost 10 years later. yet, at the same time there aren’t a lotof other toy video cameras to really compare it to. there weren’t very many products like that. so just for a reference, here’s what thepixel camera looked like. versus what the tyco camera looked like. so it’s pretty clear the tyco camera produceda better picture, and cost quite a bit less
too, because it didn’t need to carry aroundits own recording mechanism. also, the microphone on this camera is nottoo bad. had something like this existed when i wasa kid, i would have probably used the heck out of something like this. where if it i had the fisher price camerawith all of its problems, i probably would have gotten frustrated with it. and i’d probably have a lot of videos toshow for it today. on the other hand, my parents would have probablybeen very irritated because i would have been hauling the vcr all around the house becausei would have had a 20 foot ball and chain
with me, so to speak. anyway, that about wraps it up for this review. i hope you found it interesting, and stickaround until next time!