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My favourite bodge, the tapeless camcorder - 09/07/2023

My first blog! Feels great to actually have something worth writing about on this site, and it isn't even transport related.

As I've already put out well in the About Me section, another one of my "niche" interests is in retro/classic media tech, such as cameras, televisions, audio systems, etc. So as you can imagine, when I came across an old Panasonic NV-RX5 in a charity shop for the fair price of £25, there was very little I could do to prevent myself from pulling out my wallet.

The lady at the counter was pretty adamant that everything was in full working condition. I attempted to turn it on in store but nothing came out of it. At the time I figured it was fair to assume the battery was out of juice, so I figured i'd take the risk. Overall it was a pretty big package. I was getting a whole lot for £25. The camera, 2 VHS-C tapes, along with a VCR adapter, power adapter, all the connector cables I needed, all the straps, the manual, some sort of odd mount, an IF wireless remote to control playback. Even a nice big carry-case for everything! I figured I could get something out of those even if it did turn out to be dead.

Once I returned home, I immediately plugged it into the mains and hooked the camera up to the power adapter while I let the battery charge. I heard a whirr or so and the camera turned on immediately. I was pretty chuffed to find it in this condition if I have to be honest. Since it was my first experience with a camera this old, I had a few concerns regarding the state of the device which eventually turned out to be nothing. For example the viewfinder was in B&W, which I now understand was a pretty common attribute for cheaper models.

I got a bit overexcited and started filming, only to discover afterwards I had taped over about 5 seconds of existing footage on the tape. Obviously I had to check this footage out, after all it could've been something interesting.

Overall the tape had around 15 minutes of footage taken on what I assume was a farm near where I got it from. While I did purchase the camera in Aberystwyth, in mid-wales, I was still pretty surprised to discover the person behind the camera was talking in Welsh. It was all just a video of a woman going around the farm, with shots of different animals, including a short segment of what I must say was a wonderful looking sheepdog.

I was curious as to how old the footage was. For all I knew I could've been looking at something from well into the 90's. I rummaged around the video looking for anything suggestive of a time period, and luckily came across a numberplate. A quick check on gov.uk showed it was an Isuzu Trooper from 1993. Okay, so pretty old, and the MOT expired in 2012, so it's safe to assume the footage was made at some point in that period. Whatever, my new concern was in losing this footage, so I figured I'd try not to tape over any more of the footage.

I decided to test the battery now that I'd been charging it for a bit, so I threw it in, however to no avail, I got nothing. I started to worry a little. The whole point of the camera was that it's meant to be handheld and portable. If it wasn't able to take any battery power then it was effectively useless as a portable camera. I tested the voltage being drawn by the battery and got 4.8V, exactly as it said on the tin. Uh oh.

If the battery was healthy that suggested a device fault. At first I figured the contacts on the battery slot were broken, and looking at one it did seem to be bent upwards a little, which to me suggested it wasn't connected properly. I felt like a device as intricate as this was a little out of my skill level in terms of disassembly, and so I figured i'd test it for continuity instead of investigating the internals.

However to my surprise, after testing for continuity between the two prongs, I discovered they were both making a sufficient connection. So perhaps it isn't a device fault? I was debating whether or not I should invest in a replacement battery to truly draw a final verdict. I figured hey, I've worked a few extra shifts this week, what the hell. I found a lovely 2100mAh replacement on Amazon for only £18, and figured it was money worth burning for the sake of chance.

The battery arrived the next day and despite discovering it was made in France upon it's arrival, I figured it was in good enough condition to get the job done. I threw it in straight away and flicked the switch. To my great shock, the camera turned on immediately. Holy moly! I can actually hold it and move it around now without needing to be hooked up to the wall! Now that I was able to power it sufficiently I figured the next step was learning a bit more about it's functionality. I went through all the basics in the manual - timestamps, exposure, optical stabilisation, auto-focus, playback, and of course hooking it up to the television. Luckily my TV accepted AV, and so I was able to playback footage through that. The sound quality was actually pretty good too, and the colours weren't exactly awful. I just took that as an attribute of the tapes.

The next step for me now was digital conversion. Sure it's cool having everything on tapes, but we threw out our VCR years ago, and I didn't feel like pumping out £60 for an old telly just to watch some old tapes. Looking online I discovered the most common method for going "tapeless" was by using something called a ClearClick converter. These were essentially fancy portable capture cards you could mount to your camera to use as an alternative to filming to tape, instead just taking the footage directly from the source and saving it digitally. That sounded pretty cool to me, so I checked online for prices.

£145 on Amazon. Yeesh. I'm sure it's worth the money and all, it's just I don't have that sort of money to experiment with. So I had to find an alternative. I figured I should find a way of taking playback from the camera and somehow getting it onto my PC. Looking online I discovered these odd looking AV-to-USB adapters. They acted as a capture device, which could be used on software like OBS to convert to video. Great, considering it only costs a tenner it could be worth trying.

It arrived the next day and I hooked it up to the PC. After installing a bunch of strange drivers and freeware shipped with the device, none of which seem to have been updated since the days of Vista, I brought up OBS and decided to give it a go. After configuring the source footage it actually came out pretty well! The quality was, well, adequate. The framerate seemed to be limited to 30, which I was hoping was a mistake on my end. Maybe it was, but right now this was sufficient. I decided sooner rather than later, I should look into digitising those tapes from before. So I did! Overall both tapes gave me around 22 minutes of footage from this farm. I figured I could keep them incase I ever stumbled upon the original owners while living in Aberystwyth.

So now I had a full working camcorder, 2 tapes which I could now comfortably overwrite, as well as 2 new tapes I bid on for 99p on ebay (what am I losing, really?).