Siemens star of Sharp Max seen through a Carl Zeiss 28mm DigiPrime in viewfinder of a Sony PMW-350.
Photo by D. W. Leitner

For projects requiring high shooting ratios in the early 1980s, you could shoot 16mm or try on for size one of those newfangled "camcorders" from Sony, Panasonic, or Bosch: Betacam, Recam, or Quartercam. (Mid-word capitalization arrived with the dot.com era a decade later.) The first two featured 1/2in. videotape cassettes, the last, 1/4in. (Ampex in the United States, original inventor of video recording, also proposed 1/4in. helical recording, but never became a player.)

Success of 1/4in. videotape, an idea ahead of its time, would await introduction of MiniDV in the late ’90s, but the 1/2in. videotape camcorder took off from the starting gate. (Would you believe "camcorder" had to be coined by a reviewer? David Lachenbruch, longtime editorial director of the newsletter Television Digest, also coined "consumer electronics." Anyone know who came up with "prosumer"?)

1/2in. videotape camcorders, epitomized by Betacam, are the reason many of us first encountered the eccentricities and shortcomings of video zooms designed for electronic newsgathering. (Who came up with ENG? Or EFP, electronic field production, for that matter?) more