I was trying to figure out why folks kept commenting as if I was saying that widescreen TVs didn't exist outside of Japan in 2001... and now I've realized that it DOES sound like that, because of an editing oversight. What I originally said was that in 2001, the only widescreen CRTs _that would work in this country_ were in Japan, so anyone who had one would have to be an extreme enthusiast and hyper-early-adopter, who would therefore not be in the target market for this product. PAL sets wouldn't be of any use due to the broadcast standard mismatch - but that was a lot of talking, so I cut out about half of it, and didn't realize I still had the now-confusing comment about Japan in there. Ah, so it turns out there were HD CRTs on the North American market! I have never seen one made before 2003 that wasn't for professional markets, but it turns out there were a whole handful. It doesn't really affect the bottom line of the product review, but it does sting; I actually spent a while looking this up during and after shooting and didn't find anything, so it appears I just need to get better at research. A lot of people are saying the foam tape in the Microsoft device is to reduce noise. There isn't any noise, it's a 3.5" floppy drive, they're nearly silent even when mounted in a resonant steel chassis. To wit, the Cool-iCam is an even lighter plastic case with the drive rigidly mounted with screws and it doesn't make any noise you can hear from even a foot away. A VCR would be more noticeable.
I honestly thought 90s widescreen PAL was just not important enough to retain, but found it totally understandable. Editing oversight makes a lot of sense too though. (Also; PAL widescreen was 14:9, not 16:9, as I recall. And not massively adopted until DAB at 16:9 was dominating, anyway.)
@@xproot0 The thing is: it would have been fine to keep **in retrospect**. If you applied that logic to every tangent that was cut, this video would have been 3h long and "nobody" would watch it.
When he complained about switching from 15 to 17 inch screens down to 6 inch screens, I really thought he was going to say "I don't think they should even make them this small", which is my other favorite recurring gag that he does
And honestly if they’d somehow made it in the early 90s, the fuzzy logic that is no doubt in play would probably have been branded AI as well. But by 2001 it was old hat and in every automatic dishwasher, tumble drier, rice cooker, microwave with advanced popcorn function, etc etc. (Ironically some companies are now trying to sell fuzzy logic as AI again though…)
I just want to say that the deadpan delivery of you plugging the power supply into the 2.5mm TV output with the adapter was masterful, especially after that perfect cut! That got me good.
Dang, what a huge amount of effort to design a product around just the most painful and soul-destroying camera. Imagine being an engineer on that project, knowing that the absolute best you could do is tack value onto a value-less item made to scam the unwary...
Your only reward is that the capacitor or screw you manage to eliminate can go towards the CEO's new yacht. The odds are that the consumer will trash the camera in frustration before your cost optimization ever hurts them.
This is more or less the thought process that was the final straw for me dropping engineering as a major. I realized I’d most likely hate the shit I was designing, because I hate the way modern things are made. Cheap planned obsolescence garbage for a throw away society. The rot penetrates to almost all types of consumer goods, from cars to appliances to tech.
1-hour photo developer here and i had to process the APS film. The camera didn't just "throw away" that portion of the frame... It marked the frame with a mark or digital recording to tell the photo equipment if it was C, H or P. However, you also had the choice as a processor to use the entire frame and print them all in one format (which happened a lot!) It was very common for users to forget to switch the format. So they would request all H or C type pictures. Also these are not the only 2 units for this. Sony had one as well for the Mavica cameras. Also the Mavica cameras would run in this format as well. There were all kinds of Floppy TV players out there. Working for Ritz camera, i definitely had no shortage of them. I also still use Picture it to this day. I love it for the ease of use and its very intuitive. This is the express version so it doesnt have the bells and whistles. It upgraded to Digital Image Suite and does take some small things to make it work with Windows 10 and 11.
Yeah, I have a few APS index-prints where they show thumbnails for all the photos printed, and a frame that indicates the area actually printed - the rest of the photo is still there on the index print. If you want to print the whole recorded frame, select H and never move it. That's what I did!
Bleh what a cheap, junk gimmick to just mark part of a frame as "irrelevant". They could've at least been animorphic or something to get a bit of extra detail out of it. Just seems like something someone could've had done on a photo taken with normal film at that rate. I'm sure enlargements of sections of photos was something people could have done.
@@Aeduo It's an improvement over what a lot of 35mm cameras with a panoroma feature did: Just block out part of the frame with a some sliding doors, meaning you can't un-crop the picture as you can with APS-P. Edit: In fact a lot of APS features more or less boil down to giving instructions to the photo finisher. The C and P modes says what crop you want, and you can also set how many duplicates of a certain photo you want with some cameras. Also adding titles etc. It also saves EXIF information like a digital camera with shutter speed and aperture. I quite like it, and wish APS film was still made lol. It's one of those analog-digital hybrid techniques that is so delightfully 90s. I use an APS SLR with expired film at times and the results are pretty good given the small negative size and expired film.
@@bountyjedi It was definitely an improvement over 35mm. Of course the main reason it never became successful was that digital started to appear too quickly after it was introduced. But even if it had more time to catch on, it would probably have been a tough sell. 35mm was so entrenched it would have taken a lot more than a few features like metadata and automatic loading/rewinding that only a few nerds cared about. Plus all the people saying "BuT tHe FrAmE iS sMaLlEr" as if they ever in their lives enlarged something remotely close to the point where it would make a visible difference.
I would definitely love watching a 2 hours video of you reviewing the `How to photograph your family` book. Would love to hear your takes on photography, as we mostly are exposed to your videography side !
Hey that's a HIGH END COMPOSITE. Glass fibre core, epoxy resin with astounding crosslinking depth, copper outer. Spectacular material. Problem's all the pesky chips, ceramic capacitors, and whatnot are on there too, might end up breaking them if you push it too far.
the concept of a lost media floppy disc called "How to Take Photos of Your Family" that's distributed seemingly unofficially with this device has some extreme creepypasta vibes. i hear that title and i just kind of assume that whoever made it really, really liked Petscop.
It's weird right? My first impression was that it was maybe a school project. Then, I would like to amuse myself and think some manager on a Friday afternoon at Microsoft sent it on the cheap as the product was already failing lol. Microsoft's shindig is to come off polished, but this is early 2000's and floppy disks had already been on the out so it was destined to fail. Especially as digital camera sensors got better and better
be kinda funny if the dude who wrote the book was working in a store that sold the device, unshrinkwrapping each box, adding his disk then re shrinkwrapping it before putting it on the shelf ;) I know a guy who worked in a computer store in the 90's where his boss had him unshrinkwrap all the products, pull out the promotional tchotchkes (mousepads and the like) and re-wrap the box so they could sell the promotional stuff separately, soo...
4:02 - "I long for the taste of line voltage" is annoyingly a thing my cat Bosco does as well. Like I never give him strings because I don't want him to eat 120v and yet he's compelled! Maddening! I've given up on trying to get him to not chase mouse cursors.
Gen X here and can confirm. I am STILL having to fix my mother's "broken" TV by hitting the "Source" button one damn time. If I ask her to do it she claims she has been...but she hasn't. Pretty sure this is the reason the NES had the auto switch over RF box because my mom, in the early 80s, constantly claimed I "Broke the TV" if I left the manual slider style Atari box in the "game" position!
The worst is when you add a broken rubber dome inside the remote to the mix. So she just keeps pressing harder to get it to work, until one day “I *am* doing it!!” and you can’t get the button to work either…
@@CantankerousDavewireless connectivity, simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to printers. I love not dragging my laptop over to the printer, but I somehow end up needing to anyway. Especially in any environment where the WiFi is at all spotty.
Huh, even mentally healthy and relatively younger adults were having those confusions about stuff back then. I guess the culture and experience was just sooooooo static over long periods of time, people just lost their ability to deal with adaptation to things really early on in life.
That techno intro of the image editing software has peak parody shitpost vibes. The people which made it must have had a lot of fun trolling their grey haired manager by telling him how futuristic it is.
Gravis on Udon: "She's a very special cat! She is a spirit, she drifts from place to place, she cannot be predicted or controlled." Gravis on Udon literally only 15 minutes before: "FUCKING RACOON!!"
Congratulations on the Googlewhack; a rare treat. Re: the Microsoft device's use as a "screensaver" In the XP era I remember my dentist had a computer in the lobby that used the screensaver slideshow function display various marketing and educational images, not unlike what The Edge may have done in a previous life. I imagine the floppy device could have done the same thing for 1/5 the cost when compared to a whole monitor and a computer if its existence had been more widely known.
My workplace has a chromebook with google slides plugged into a TV so they can show company bulletins. I don't know what that says about the advancement of technology in 2 decades, but it says something I think.
If memory serves, APS cameras always shot every picture full frame, but then just put a marker on the film indicating what format the picture was supposed to be. But you did have the option to go back to the developers and ask them to please reprint this one in a different format, which might possibly remedy uncle Brian's right arm being cropped off.
What a trip. We went from Grandmas, to drug store cameras, to Foveon and Polaroid. I didn't expect nearly as many twists as were given to me. Another excellent piece from you. You never fail to delight.
Incredible! I remember selling the Microsoft one back in the day when I worked at Office Depot... alongside Palm OS and Pocket PCs. I love all your videos, even if you trash talked PDAs that one time 😂
My 95 year old grandma is *still* fighting the good fight of not fully understanding how the cordless phone works and trying to get me to explain to her how to set her answering machine's away message OVER THE PHONE as a televised baseball game blares in the background. Bless her soul, she'd probably love this TV floppy disc thing.
Heh, I have a grandmother of similar age, but she is terrified of anything "different." So even though a floppy photo viewer is a pretty braindead product in terms of simplicity, she wouldn't like it, just because it's not something that existed in the first several decades of her life. For example, her house is heated by oil, and periodically she needs to check the tank's level to see if it needs refilled, which is a trip down to a not-exactly-safe-for-a-96-year-old-woman basement. My dad setup a camera and monitor so she could just see the oil level gauge safely from the ground floor -- literally a passive device that essentially she didn't have to do anything with -- and demanded he remove it, because it was just something new and strange and she can't deal with it. She actually otherwise functions very well for a 96 year old, but she just needs everything to basically stay exactly the same.
FWIW, Iomega made something called the FotoShow which did something similar but with Zip disks. I also vaguely remember having a Sandisk device which was a similar device, but with a multi-format card reader.
As a former media play associate from 1998 till 2003, 16 by 9 was brand spanking new, expensive as all get out, and your average grandparent from Monroe county NY preferred 4by 3. Because it's what they had. Media play actually sent us promo cards with our DVD shipments to explain the difference with pictures. And we did not even sell TVs!
7:50 Oh man, I totally forgot about 110mm cameras. I had one when I was a kid and I remember using it to take pictures on pretty much every school field trip. A few of the pictures even came out okay 😆
yeah 110 was the way with the cheap and nasty kiddy cameras used to work when I was a kid. I presume they invented the "cartridge" format so that kids wouldn't screw up loading the film.
Love your cat's coloration. It's like it can be distilled down to three pixels, a Halo 3 emblem -- black square, orange square, and underneath them both, white rectangle.
Adore this video, loved the photography tangent and the Udon photo editing excursion. The reaction to the internals of the floppy photo viewer was GOLD
The only benefit that APS had was that if you shot in panorama format you got a wider image, that was wider and shorter than the usual print paper, but it cost you exactly the same. So that way you got more "bang for your buck" for your wide panorama images.
@@CathodeRayDude Worked in an overnight film processing factory in about 2001 that processed film for pharmacies and some mail in services - I think the building was Kodak branded. We processed 35mm and APS film stock. Fascinating place, the 35mm was all spliced together into huge 1m diameter rolls, and processed in bulk, and then your family pictures were grouped and put into those photo envelopes. The photopaper was also developed from huge continuous rolls and guillotined into individual photos. And the APS panoramas were indeed longer strips cut from the roll. This is brining back a flood of memories, imagine the kind of place that hires students for overnight work, pay is shit, and there was people drinking on the job. The opportunity to ruin 100's of undeveloped film on a huge roll was real, seen it more than once. There was a fad of underwater cameras back then, and if the film canister going into the re-rolling machine was wet inside it jammed the machine, and had to me repaired in total darkness. Did I mention the low pay and drinking? Yeah, I told people back then not to send your pictures off for next day processing! APS film was more automated, so probably less likely to get your pics ruined, but it was always a non zero chance for sure! 1 or 3 hour development in the pharmacy was probably safer, as they processed one roll at a time.... The final stage of the production line was fun too, this place was like the projection room of a cinema with strips of film and photo paper going everywhere, through chemical baths, drying stages, dark rooms, and once section had all the processed images going round and round on a wall, with QC people looking at them before they were chopped up and sent off to the customer. They would put a big red X with a crayon on the pictures that were processed badly, and sometimes a single picture would be reprocessed to correct for under or over exposure - which was nice of them. But they also looked for illegal stuff I guess, and oh boy the amount of home made porn.... did I mention the kind of miscreants that worked this job? Yeah, all the homemade porn was going into some creepy guys personal collection, the lunch room was plastered with celebrities and funny pictures that were spotted in the continuous stream of images.... like doom scrolling at 10meters per second. That place had three shifts, and ran 24 hours a day for god knows how long. I wonder when the lines stopped, hoy many images went through there.....
4:53 AFAIK, PC floppies could use the disk in signal but they didn't specify what signalled a disk in versus a disk out. They actually planned to ship auto-mounting floppies in Windows 95 but bailed on the idea when they realized they couldn't tell what way the floppy was wired. That's why it's called a change line. Though that wouldn't be a problem on this device, they could have just made sure to buy drives with the correct change line polarity, or test each one and have the device remember what the signal means.
I literally got a Microsoft TV Photo Viewer CIB last week at a thrift store for $3.00, one week before you posted this video. You have excellent timing!
16:9 in 2001? We absolutely had one then, gigantic rear-display Mitsubishi unit, set-top boxes (and my consoles) actially sat atop it and the wires cascaded down the back, I loved it. It was even 1080i, not that anything we put through it could ever make use of that. Mitsubishi are of course Japanese, but my father bought it in America. No idea what store, but we did live on the west coast.
I don't know if it's actually RGB24 *on the wire*, is the thing. A lot of cameras, even in the USB2 and 3 era, do transparent compression inside the driver, the capture utility just receives the raw RGB/YUV. On the other hand, they could have skipped the mjpeg encoder IP core to save money, in which case you'd be right, it would severely limit what they could fit over the wire, and that wouldn't be surprising at all, haha.
Thank you so much for teaching me the term "googlewhack" I write books and your prose, whether it's scripted or not, is just freaking beautiful most of the time, and I mean that sincerely. You are so profoundly eloquent, and I genuinely admire it about you. A joy to listen to you.
In Europe we had a few 16:9 CRT sets since 1997, but they were super expensive. The Grundig Argato 82 100Hz comes to my mind as example. But the people owning these usually had some sort of HTPC with RGB video output or a fancy DVD player which did JPEG slideshows. //edited, typo
I don't remember s video being common in Europe at all on TVs likely due to the prevalence of SCART. I remember having a digital camera in the mid 00's that did panoramas stitched from individual stills, not sure how common that was. Great video as always!
S-Video over SCART and RGB over SCART had extensive support though. On higher end sets, front S-Video hidden under a flip panel was not too uncommon. Also if you had an S-VHS recorder, those had front S-Video you could use as a pass-through.
I knew exactly one person whose family had a JVC TV with S-video on the front, and an S-VHS deck underneath it with another one. Everyone else I knew used those SCART adapters with a composite/S-video switch 😅 which knowing what I know about them now, many were probably just crudely combining the two signals into composite anyway!
@@JeremyLevi True, however photo cd was about a buck a scan and wasn't worth it for most casual users. Floppies at time of development were lo-rez but maybe added a few dollars per roll.Also Kodak mostly promoted the use of their player deck to display photos and nobody bought them. I worked in the photo business at the time and you could hardly give the players away. Too bad because the format was good.
@@astutefish Maybe it was just where I lived but PhotoCD costs didn't really add *that* much extra to the already nontrivial cost of development & prints. You're right about the dedicated players though, the value in PhotoCDs for me was more how easily it meant you could get high quality photos onto your computer.
Man I remember this device! Holy moley, my friend had this and we would go to his house to pictures of a rather more… adult nature. It was awesome! We would then share disks to copy and bring our own pictures next time to view and our friend would use his PC to do stuff and soon we could view it. It was a more simpler time
@@samuzamu it’s uncommon but I lowkey prefer it over the high capacity one hanging out the back like so many did. A bunch of battery pins (or the latches) got broken by people forgetting their overhang, or using them as a handle. Making them a wrist rest seems like probably less torque..
20:00 The music was also used in the game Hot Wheels: Mechanix, it came from a stock music disk which I think has been located. What a weird connection.
You always surprise me by taking something that could be justifiably too boring to cover and making it entertaining for this full-length format. Well done!
Hey Gravis, sorry if this is too personal of a comment but I'll say it anyway -- I'm really glad that you produce content like this because my power has been out at home for seven days, going on eight. When I'm at Starbucks charging my devices and pondering my life, your content keeps me going. THANK YOU.
Bro the whole reason I want your channel cuz you always pull out some crazy tech I've never seen in my life and I was a kid in the 90s. And some of the things you pull out I have craziness nostalgia for. Love your crazy obscure little items and the channel. Don't say no to these little things say yes and make a video about them so I could watch. Obviously I'm not the only person who likes this channel in these crazy little gadgets from the 90s 80s 70s and beyond
As an Argentine, every gadget you shown from early 2000s were "high tech" in that time. Also, my grandfather had a TV with a phosphor burn. He had activated the OSD time, and doesn't know how to turn it off, so it stays in the screen forever.
I was poking about in the comments and heard the "Dark Spirit" theme and said (to myself) "oh, a cat just appeared!" This is what good, consistent branding looks like!!
42:50 🤣 This is one of the most amusing and interesting tech videos I've watched for a while. Your analysis and commentary, particularly of the dock internals, was fascinating.
@33:24 "most digital cameras were crappy still crappy enough that they could still fit a decent amount of pictures on a single 1.4 meg disk" explains why it took me so long to give up using my 35mm SLR. That and the absolutely miserable battery life.
Re similar things - There is an older format called "video floppy" that stored analog still frames on special 2 inch floppy disks in a format similar to how SECAM video was stored on VHS tapes (fm modulated luminance and each chroma component fm modulated and frequency divided and stored on alternating lines). It was more a professional format than something for home use though.
Funny enough that did eventually get consumer grade devices released using that format ... just prior to the rise of digital photography rendering it immediately outmoded.
Great video and how you made a rather mundane topic, A really enjoyable, B Fly by at even hour and twenty mins. Cheers again dude From me and my dog Max from the UK 🙂
every time you talk about one of these crappy old cameras I'm reminded and informed about why for so long so many youtube videos, blogs etc had the absolute crappiest picture quality
@@CathodeRayDude I think it came up in one of your videos too, can't remember which one, but it was something to do with digital photography. That or LGR managed to find a copy of it when he was looking at another of the floppy cameras of this era too and we're all doing an attribution error.
I remember back in the 90s you could buy panoramic format disposable cameras and I guess they were pretty popular because most stores usually had at least one option for that
The grandma angle was one I hadn't thought of. Pretty much every digital camera I saw at the time had a component out (some s-video as well), so you could plug your camera directly into your TV. We used to take great delight in zooming in to random shots, trying to find people that had no idea that they had their photo taken. Having a through put device was a genius idea that could work for certain consumers, though
About APS encoding: there’s a magnetic strip on the side of the film This is the centerpiece of the whole APS project: storing the equivalent of EXIF data on the film for extra automation
I would assume the floppy in the Microsoft is on foam for noise reasons and durability reasons. And the lack of screws is cheaper and maybe faster to assemble?
My gut feeling was that they wanted to use the screw holes to mount the floppy drive, but then figured out there was a flaw in that approach *after* making the moulds and needing to change something somewhere. Noise and durability checks out as what those problems could've been.
USB sticks (Flash drives). I went to college in the span of 2000 to 2004. Everything was floppy disk, a few computers had CD burners or ZIP drives, but you were pretty much expected to save all your work to floppy disk, so every computer had a floppy disk. When I visit the college the next year (I ended up working there) in 2005, Flash drives were finally starting to not only just become a thing (Seriously, nobody even mentioned them while I was at college as a student, I didn't know they existed), but they were starting to become a standard. I think it was about 2007 when nobody was using floppy disks (at the college) any more. (Except a few people, like me, but that was for transferring data to a specialised Windows 98 machine to control a CNC drill. But it was one of those machines with a ZIP drive, so I got a USB zip drive and used that.)
The anecdote about the polaroid camera being recalled before release is incorrect according to wikipedia and it's 2005 source. It was recalled 2 days after release because of "a firmware issue" i.e. all the photos looked like shit. And the foveon sensor was sold in about 10 different sigma cameras, and sigma eventually bought them out.
That's what they said publicly. The *rumor* is that they just didn't want the thing selling. I know Sigma sold a bunch of foveons, but as far as I know none of them retailed for under a grand and they were all enthusiast-focused. I was saying that the Polaroid is the only _cheap piece of crap_ with a Foveon, and as far as I know that's still true.
![A CD-R, that's only partly a CD-R [Ricoh Encryptease]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_5ucImqdKbY/mqdefault.jpg)
I was trying to figure out why folks kept commenting as if I was saying that widescreen TVs didn't exist outside of Japan in 2001... and now I've realized that it DOES sound like that, because of an editing oversight. What I originally said was that in 2001, the only widescreen CRTs _that would work in this country_ were in Japan, so anyone who had one would have to be an extreme enthusiast and hyper-early-adopter, who would therefore not be in the target market for this product. PAL sets wouldn't be of any use due to the broadcast standard mismatch - but that was a lot of talking, so I cut out about half of it, and didn't realize I still had the now-confusing comment about Japan in there.
Ah, so it turns out there were HD CRTs on the North American market! I have never seen one made before 2003 that wasn't for professional markets, but it turns out there were a whole handful. It doesn't really affect the bottom line of the product review, but it does sting; I actually spent a while looking this up during and after shooting and didn't find anything, so it appears I just need to get better at research.
A lot of people are saying the foam tape in the Microsoft device is to reduce noise. There isn't any noise, it's a 3.5" floppy drive, they're nearly silent even when mounted in a resonant steel chassis. To wit, the Cool-iCam is an even lighter plastic case with the drive rigidly mounted with screws and it doesn't make any noise you can hear from even a foot away. A VCR would be more noticeable.
Widescreen CRTS were so awkward to move around. Had one as a kid… early 2000’s
The video is already one hour on some floppy picture viewers, this little bit would probably not have hurt to keep
I honestly thought 90s widescreen PAL was just not important enough to retain, but found it totally understandable. Editing oversight makes a lot of sense too though.
(Also; PAL widescreen was 14:9, not 16:9, as I recall. And not massively adopted until DAB at 16:9 was dominating, anyway.)
Had a Panasonic plasma 49 inch flat screen tv.
@@xproot0 The thing is: it would have been fine to keep **in retrospect**.
If you applied that logic to every tangent that was cut, this video would have been 3h long and "nobody" would watch it.
You never have to apologize for making the “two of them” joke
It’s one of my favorite recurring gags you do
Mine too! It always makes me giggle
The kitties are sooo cute
I see a weird connection here
When he complained about switching from 15 to 17 inch screens down to 6 inch screens, I really thought he was going to say "I don't think they should even make them this small", which is my other favorite recurring gag that he does
@@sapientsatellitea connection with technology probably
Gravis, imagine if Alec stopped saying "through the magic of buying two of them". That's how we'd feel if you stopped your "two of them" gag.
And the "lets ask the internet" tune. I have started humming this to myself when I gotta look something up.
1:15:10 If this camera was made today, this "fix the image in software" feature would 200% have been sold as "AI"
And honestly if they’d somehow made it in the early 90s, the fuzzy logic that is no doubt in play would probably have been branded AI as well. But by 2001 it was old hat and in every automatic dishwasher, tumble drier, rice cooker, microwave with advanced popcorn function, etc etc.
(Ironically some companies are now trying to sell fuzzy logic as AI again though…)
LG has been doing it a long time with thinq
I just want to say that the deadpan delivery of you plugging the power supply into the 2.5mm TV output with the adapter was masterful, especially after that perfect cut! That got me good.
thank you for keeping the "cat appeared" jingle consistent so I can get a cue to look at the screen
Dang, what a huge amount of effort to design a product around just the most painful and soul-destroying camera. Imagine being an engineer on that project, knowing that the absolute best you could do is tack value onto a value-less item made to scam the unwary...
Your only reward is that the capacitor or screw you manage to eliminate can go towards the CEO's new yacht. The odds are that the consumer will trash the camera in frustration before your cost optimization ever hurts them.
What an effort to make a video about it
This is more or less the thought process that was the final straw for me dropping engineering as a major. I realized I’d most likely hate the shit I was designing, because I hate the way modern things are made. Cheap planned obsolescence garbage for a throw away society. The rot penetrates to almost all types of consumer goods, from cars to appliances to tech.
@@tylerfrankel5374skill issue
@@tylerfrankel5374 Never ending greed and entitlement are literally destroying our species.
1-hour photo developer here and i had to process the APS film. The camera didn't just "throw away" that portion of the frame... It marked the frame with a mark or digital recording to tell the photo equipment if it was C, H or P. However, you also had the choice as a processor to use the entire frame and print them all in one format (which happened a lot!) It was very common for users to forget to switch the format. So they would request all H or C type pictures. Also these are not the only 2 units for this. Sony had one as well for the Mavica cameras. Also the Mavica cameras would run in this format as well. There were all kinds of Floppy TV players out there. Working for Ritz camera, i definitely had no shortage of them.
I also still use Picture it to this day. I love it for the ease of use and its very intuitive. This is the express version so it doesnt have the bells and whistles. It upgraded to Digital Image Suite and does take some small things to make it work with Windows 10 and 11.
Yeah, I have a few APS index-prints where they show thumbnails for all the photos printed, and a frame that indicates the area actually printed - the rest of the photo is still there on the index print.
If you want to print the whole recorded frame, select H and never move it. That's what I did!
Bleh what a cheap, junk gimmick to just mark part of a frame as "irrelevant". They could've at least been animorphic or something to get a bit of extra detail out of it. Just seems like something someone could've had done on a photo taken with normal film at that rate. I'm sure enlargements of sections of photos was something people could have done.
@@Aeduo It's an improvement over what a lot of 35mm cameras with a panoroma feature did: Just block out part of the frame with a some sliding doors, meaning you can't un-crop the picture as you can with APS-P.
Edit: In fact a lot of APS features more or less boil down to giving instructions to the photo finisher. The C and P modes says what crop you want, and you can also set how many duplicates of a certain photo you want with some cameras. Also adding titles etc. It also saves EXIF information like a digital camera with shutter speed and aperture. I quite like it, and wish APS film was still made lol. It's one of those analog-digital hybrid techniques that is so delightfully 90s. I use an APS SLR with expired film at times and the results are pretty good given the small negative size and expired film.
Makes me wonder if anywhere scanned and put pictures onto floppy disks like they do with DVDs today
@@bountyjedi It was definitely an improvement over 35mm. Of course the main reason it never became successful was that digital started to appear too quickly after it was introduced. But even if it had more time to catch on, it would probably have been a tough sell. 35mm was so entrenched it would have taken a lot more than a few features like metadata and automatic loading/rewinding that only a few nerds cared about. Plus all the people saying "BuT tHe FrAmE iS sMaLlEr" as if they ever in their lives enlarged something remotely close to the point where it would make a visible difference.
I would definitely love watching a 2 hours video of you reviewing the `How to photograph your family` book. Would love to hear your takes on photography, as we mostly are exposed to your videography side !
Absolutely agree!
Structural PCB is the Load-Bearing Drywall of the tech world.
Fans pressed right up against the glass is the insulated stairs.
and random pieces of off-brand kapton tape is the equivalent of load bearing wallpaper
Double sided sticky foam to glue together the whole device is the low quality reinforced concrete with rusting rebar of the tech world.
Hey that's a HIGH END COMPOSITE. Glass fibre core, epoxy resin with astounding crosslinking depth, copper outer. Spectacular material.
Problem's all the pesky chips, ceramic capacitors, and whatnot are on there too, might end up breaking them if you push it too far.
@@SianaGearzomg i love composite materials
*repeats Udon on the desk scene for 1 hour 20 minutes* Excellent video.
42:49 That was so unexpected my heart legitemately sank when I saw you do that.
the concept of a lost media floppy disc called "How to Take Photos of Your Family" that's distributed seemingly unofficially with this device has some extreme creepypasta vibes. i hear that title and i just kind of assume that whoever made it really, really liked Petscop.
It's weird right? My first impression was that it was maybe a school project. Then, I would like to amuse myself and think some manager on a Friday afternoon at Microsoft sent it on the cheap as the product was already failing lol. Microsoft's shindig is to come off polished, but this is early 2000's and floppy disks had already been on the out so it was destined to fail. Especially as digital camera sensors got better and better
This needs to be on Lost Media Wiki
be kinda funny if the dude who wrote the book was working in a store that sold the device, unshrinkwrapping each box, adding his disk then re shrinkwrapping it before putting it on the shelf ;)
I know a guy who worked in a computer store in the 90's where his boss had him unshrinkwrap all the products, pull out the promotional tchotchkes (mousepads and the like) and re-wrap the box so they could sell the promotional stuff separately, soo...
It’s **ALWAYS** a convenient time for udon.
Such a pretty kitty!
Lovely beast.
The Purrs
4:02 - "I long for the taste of line voltage" is annoyingly a thing my cat Bosco does as well. Like I never give him strings because I don't want him to eat 120v and yet he's compelled! Maddening!
I've given up on trying to get him to not chase mouse cursors.
Udon made the video 27% better.
Gen X here and can confirm. I am STILL having to fix my mother's "broken" TV by hitting the "Source" button one damn time. If I ask her to do it she claims she has been...but she hasn't. Pretty sure this is the reason the NES had the auto switch over RF box because my mom, in the early 80s, constantly claimed I "Broke the TV" if I left the manual slider style Atari box in the "game" position!
That’s my mom, but also with her wireless printer.
The worst is when you add a broken rubber dome inside the remote to the mix. So she just keeps pressing harder to get it to work, until one day “I *am* doing it!!” and you can’t get the button to work either…
@@CantankerousDavewireless connectivity, simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to printers. I love not dragging my laptop over to the printer, but I somehow end up needing to anyway. Especially in any environment where the WiFi is at all spotty.
Huh, even mentally healthy and relatively younger adults were having those confusions about stuff back then. I guess the culture and experience was just sooooooo static over long periods of time, people just lost their ability to deal with adaptation to things really early on in life.
Color coded sticky tape on the input selector.
That techno intro of the image editing software has peak parody shitpost vibes. The people which made it must have had a lot of fun trolling their grey haired manager by telling him how futuristic it is.
I like to imagine it was made with the same fervor as a 12 year old filling their powerpoint project with an unthinkable amount of slide transitions
"This isn't a book review channel" CRD when "Scanjet Unlimited is a great book" CRD walks into the room.
Gravis on Udon: "She's a very special cat! She is a spirit, she drifts from place to place, she cannot be predicted or controlled."
Gravis on Udon literally only 15 minutes before: "FUCKING RACOON!!"
the venn diagram between "racoon" and "uncontrollable spirit" is just a circle
Gravis?
@@aviaviavian his name is Gravis "Cathode Ray" Dude
The duality of cat.
APS frame data is recorded magnetically, there is a tiny strip of clear magnetic material along the edge :3
Read this as "recorded magically" and fully accepted that as an explanation
:3
I like your username
Cute sona!
:3
21:45 The design of this Picture It app seems to match the Windows Neptune Activity Centers concept art.
I will never get sick of Gravis' cats interrupt the video. I love the little cuties!
Congratulations on the Googlewhack; a rare treat.
Re: the Microsoft device's use as a "screensaver"
In the XP era I remember my dentist had a computer in the lobby that used the screensaver slideshow function display various marketing and educational images, not unlike what The Edge may have done in a previous life. I imagine the floppy device could have done the same thing for 1/5 the cost when compared to a whole monitor and a computer if its existence had been more widely known.
My workplace has a chromebook with google slides plugged into a TV so they can show company bulletins. I don't know what that says about the advancement of technology in 2 decades, but it says something I think.
If memory serves, APS cameras always shot every picture full frame, but then just put a marker on the film indicating what format the picture was supposed to be. But you did have the option to go back to the developers and ask them to please reprint this one in a different format, which might possibly remedy uncle Brian's right arm being cropped off.
What a trip. We went from Grandmas, to drug store cameras, to Foveon and Polaroid. I didn't expect nearly as many twists as were given to me. Another excellent piece from you. You never fail to delight.
Udon be like: "U don't record without giving me belly rubs hooman. Real nice power cable you got here, be a real shame if somethin' happened to it!"
"Your Olympus is not going to nail this Barry Lyndon shit, okay?"
I subscribed for the tech, but I stay for the acerbic wit.
a) CAT! b) TUNIC FOX STICKER!
Also i approve of the "5 minutes later" actually being 5 minutes according to the clock
i was so happy when i saw that it was exactly as long as a spongebob title card
Some times life just throws a few bright spots your way ^-^
Incredible! I remember selling the Microsoft one back in the day when I worked at Office Depot... alongside Palm OS and Pocket PCs. I love all your videos, even if you trash talked PDAs that one time 😂
Thank you for 100% understanding the behaviors of me & the rest of the girls 🥰🥰
INSTANT two of them, we're eating good
After casually mentioning Forever by the Spice Girls I am committed to like and engage every single video you upload
"What can I say that's not obvious?" Nervously eyeballs time stamp
My 95 year old grandma is *still* fighting the good fight of not fully understanding how the cordless phone works and trying to get me to explain to her how to set her answering machine's away message OVER THE PHONE as a televised baseball game blares in the background.
Bless her soul, she'd probably love this TV floppy disc thing.
Heh, I have a grandmother of similar age, but she is terrified of anything "different." So even though a floppy photo viewer is a pretty braindead product in terms of simplicity, she wouldn't like it, just because it's not something that existed in the first several decades of her life. For example, her house is heated by oil, and periodically she needs to check the tank's level to see if it needs refilled, which is a trip down to a not-exactly-safe-for-a-96-year-old-woman basement. My dad setup a camera and monitor so she could just see the oil level gauge safely from the ground floor -- literally a passive device that essentially she didn't have to do anything with -- and demanded he remove it, because it was just something new and strange and she can't deal with it.
She actually otherwise functions very well for a 96 year old, but she just needs everything to basically stay exactly the same.
FWIW, Iomega made something called the FotoShow which did something similar but with Zip disks. I also vaguely remember having a Sandisk device which was a similar device, but with a multi-format card reader.
As a former media play associate from 1998 till 2003, 16 by 9 was brand spanking new, expensive as all get out, and your average grandparent from Monroe county NY preferred 4by 3. Because it's what they had. Media play actually sent us promo cards with our DVD shipments to explain the difference with pictures. And we did not even sell TVs!
7:50 Oh man, I totally forgot about 110mm cameras. I had one when I was a kid and I remember using it to take pictures on pretty much every school field trip. A few of the pictures even came out okay 😆
yeah 110 was the way with the cheap and nasty kiddy cameras used to work when I was a kid. I presume they invented the "cartridge" format so that kids wouldn't screw up loading the film.
Love your cat's coloration. It's like it can be distilled down to three pixels, a Halo 3 emblem -- black square, orange square, and underneath them both, white rectangle.
I went to a Simple Plan concert the other night, and now this. I might be exceeding my recommended dose of 2001 nostalgia right now 😂
Adore this video, loved the photography tangent and the Udon photo editing excursion. The reaction to the internals of the floppy photo viewer was GOLD
i felt like that video of all the blocks going into the square hole watching you adapt out the video through multiple DC adapters
Every video starts with "there's nothing special about this" and then theres 50 more minutes of interesting
I could watch just hours of random footage of your cats!
The only benefit that APS had was that if you shot in panorama format you got a wider image, that was wider and shorter than the usual print paper, but it cost you exactly the same. So that way you got more "bang for your buck" for your wide panorama images.
hah! okay, I admit I didn't know that. I wonder if they just used the same roll paper they used for 4x6 and simply ran off a longer sheet
@@CathodeRayDude Worked in an overnight film processing factory in about 2001 that processed film for pharmacies and some mail in services - I think the building was Kodak branded. We processed 35mm and APS film stock. Fascinating place, the 35mm was all spliced together into huge 1m diameter rolls, and processed in bulk, and then your family pictures were grouped and put into those photo envelopes. The photopaper was also developed from huge continuous rolls and guillotined into individual photos. And the APS panoramas were indeed longer strips cut from the roll.
This is brining back a flood of memories, imagine the kind of place that hires students for overnight work, pay is shit, and there was people drinking on the job. The opportunity to ruin 100's of undeveloped film on a huge roll was real, seen it more than once. There was a fad of underwater cameras back then, and if the film canister going into the re-rolling machine was wet inside it jammed the machine, and had to me repaired in total darkness. Did I mention the low pay and drinking? Yeah, I told people back then not to send your pictures off for next day processing! APS film was more automated, so probably less likely to get your pics ruined, but it was always a non zero chance for sure! 1 or 3 hour development in the pharmacy was probably safer, as they processed one roll at a time....
The final stage of the production line was fun too, this place was like the projection room of a cinema with strips of film and photo paper going everywhere, through chemical baths, drying stages, dark rooms, and once section had all the processed images going round and round on a wall, with QC people looking at them before they were chopped up and sent off to the customer. They would put a big red X with a crayon on the pictures that were processed badly, and sometimes a single picture would be reprocessed to correct for under or over exposure - which was nice of them. But they also looked for illegal stuff I guess, and oh boy the amount of home made porn.... did I mention the kind of miscreants that worked this job? Yeah, all the homemade porn was going into some creepy guys personal collection, the lunch room was plastered with celebrities and funny pictures that were spotted in the continuous stream of images.... like doom scrolling at 10meters per second. That place had three shifts, and ran 24 hours a day for god knows how long. I wonder when the lines stopped, hoy many images went through there.....
"This isn't a book review channel" True, but you could review a piece of toast and I'd still watch.
4:53 AFAIK, PC floppies could use the disk in signal but they didn't specify what signalled a disk in versus a disk out. They actually planned to ship auto-mounting floppies in Windows 95 but bailed on the idea when they realized they couldn't tell what way the floppy was wired. That's why it's called a change line.
Though that wouldn't be a problem on this device, they could have just made sure to buy drives with the correct change line polarity, or test each one and have the device remember what the signal means.
I literally got a Microsoft TV Photo Viewer CIB last week at a thrift store for $3.00, one week before you posted this video. You have excellent timing!
16:9 in 2001? We absolutely had one then, gigantic rear-display Mitsubishi unit, set-top boxes (and my consoles) actially sat atop it and the wires cascaded down the back, I loved it. It was even 1080i, not that anything we put through it could ever make use of that.
Mitsubishi are of course Japanese, but my father bought it in America. No idea what store, but we did live on the west coast.
I don't know if it's actually RGB24 *on the wire*, is the thing. A lot of cameras, even in the USB2 and 3 era, do transparent compression inside the driver, the capture utility just receives the raw RGB/YUV. On the other hand, they could have skipped the mjpeg encoder IP core to save money, in which case you'd be right, it would severely limit what they could fit over the wire, and that wouldn't be surprising at all, haha.
@@CathodeRayDude I'm sorry, was this the comment you meant to reply to?
@@fisherdotogg it absolutely wasn't and i don't know how that happened, lol
@@CathodeRayDude Fair enough! May you find the right one wherever it has wandered off to!
Your scathing sarcasm is a great antidote for the marketing BS. Thank you.
Thank you so much for teaching me the term "googlewhack"
I write books and your prose, whether it's scripted or not, is just freaking beautiful most of the time, and I mean that sincerely. You are so profoundly eloquent, and I genuinely admire it about you. A joy to listen to you.
Picture It! has strong Microsoft Home vibes.
In Europe we had a few 16:9 CRT sets since 1997, but they were super expensive. The Grundig Argato 82 100Hz comes to my mind as example. But the people owning these usually had some sort of HTPC with RGB video output or a fancy DVD player which did JPEG slideshows.
//edited, typo
Yes! For a time there were even analogue broadcasts in 16:9 under the fun name of PALplus: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PALplus
Yeah, the vast majority of new TVs advertised here in Finland in the late 90s were 16:9.
I don't remember s video being common in Europe at all on TVs likely due to the prevalence of SCART.
I remember having a digital camera in the mid 00's that did panoramas stitched from individual stills, not sure how common that was.
Great video as always!
S-Video over SCART and RGB over SCART had extensive support though.
On higher end sets, front S-Video hidden under a flip panel was not too uncommon.
Also if you had an S-VHS recorder, those had front S-Video you could use as a pass-through.
I knew exactly one person whose family had a JVC TV with S-video on the front, and an S-VHS deck underneath it with another one. Everyone else I knew used those SCART adapters with a composite/S-video switch 😅 which knowing what I know about them now, many were probably just crudely combining the two signals into composite anyway!
@@SianaGearz true, but it's technically not part of the standard as it uses the red channel for chroma afaik
@@SianaGearz and I have multiple Sony receivers that had it but not SCART, annoying as the north American versions got component
There were "panoramic" one-time use cameras that were popular in the late 90's. During that time labs offered scans on floppies for a while.
Scans on floppy? I mean I guess, but Kodak Photo CDs had already solved that problem since 1991.
@@JeremyLevi True, however photo cd was about a buck a scan and wasn't worth it for most casual users. Floppies at time of development were lo-rez but maybe added a few dollars per roll.Also Kodak mostly promoted the use of their player deck to display photos and nobody bought them. I worked in the photo business at the time and you could hardly give the players away. Too bad because the format was good.
@@astutefish Maybe it was just where I lived but PhotoCD costs didn't really add *that* much extra to the already nontrivial cost of development & prints. You're right about the dedicated players though, the value in PhotoCDs for me was more how easily it meant you could get high quality photos onto your computer.
Man I remember this device! Holy moley, my friend had this and we would go to his house to pictures of a rather more… adult nature. It was awesome! We would then share disks to copy and bring our own pictures next time to view and our friend would use his PC to do stuff and soon we could view it. It was a more simpler time
18:40 Latitude D620 will always stay in my heart
Yup, I had one from work. Still have it in the basement. Runs Linux like a dream.
Why is the battery in the front? Looks so different from other laptops I remember from that era. Or is it some kind of wrist rest?
@@samuzamu that's some new battery with better capacity, I guess 6600 mAh. the stock one came with 4400 mAh
@@mmilerngruppe oh cool. Laptops were so modular back then. A far cry from nowadays. Guess they were a lot less sleek though
@@samuzamu it’s uncommon but I lowkey prefer it over the high capacity one hanging out the back like so many did. A bunch of battery pins (or the latches) got broken by people forgetting their overhang, or using them as a handle. Making them a wrist rest seems like probably less torque..
This episode was such a treat! Your videos are amazing
As Max Tundra said, Parallax Error Beheads You
20:00 The music was also used in the game Hot Wheels: Mechanix, it came from a stock music disk which I think has been located. What a weird connection.
Hah! That doesn't surprise me all that much, but it DOES surprise me that I didn't get content-IDed as a result!
15:31 GODDAMNIT
That old Tony moment
15:29 have to appreciate your transparency on the matter
Came for odd tech nostalgia, got a reasonably good intro to basic photography. "Two of them" indeed.
really love the photography nerding in this video, technological and artistic
You always surprise me by taking something that could be justifiably too boring to cover and making it entertaining for this full-length format. Well done!
Hey Gravis, sorry if this is too personal of a comment but I'll say it anyway -- I'm really glad that you produce content like this because my power has been out at home for seven days, going on eight. When I'm at Starbucks charging my devices and pondering my life, your content keeps me going. THANK YOU.
Bro the whole reason I want your channel cuz you always pull out some crazy tech I've never seen in my life and I was a kid in the 90s. And some of the things you pull out I have craziness nostalgia for. Love your crazy obscure little items and the channel. Don't say no to these little things say yes and make a video about them so I could watch. Obviously I'm not the only person who likes this channel in these crazy little gadgets from the 90s 80s 70s and beyond
Finally. I can watch my Sony Mavica camera jpegs on my CRT. I'm so looking forward to the new millennium. 👍
(I hope this is all Y2K compliant)
As an Argentine, every gadget you shown from early 2000s were "high tech" in that time.
Also, my grandfather had a TV with a phosphor burn. He had activated the OSD time, and doesn't know how to turn it off, so it stays in the screen forever.
I love that Udon's invasion is so heavily replayed that it's actually clipping the graph.
I was poking about in the comments and heard the "Dark Spirit" theme and said (to myself) "oh, a cat just appeared!"
This is what good, consistent branding looks like!!
42:50 🤣 This is one of the most amusing and interesting tech videos I've watched for a while. Your analysis and commentary, particularly of the dock internals, was fascinating.
"No, your Olympus isn't going to achieve this Barry Lyndon shit"
Lmao
@33:24 "most digital cameras were crappy still crappy enough that they could still fit a decent amount of pictures on a single 1.4 meg disk" explains why it took me so long to give up using my 35mm SLR. That and the absolutely miserable battery life.
Re similar things - There is an older format called "video floppy" that stored analog still frames on special 2 inch floppy disks in a format similar to how SECAM video was stored on VHS tapes (fm modulated luminance and each chroma component fm modulated and frequency divided and stored on alternating lines). It was more a professional format than something for home use though.
Funny enough that did eventually get consumer grade devices released using that format ... just prior to the rise of digital photography rendering it immediately outmoded.
the cats are a guilty pleasure, thank you
Shoutout to the Tunic shirt!
Wow is it just me or there hasn’t been an upload from this guy in a long time…missed you dude glad you are OK
his previous video was only uploaded two weeks earlier. maybe youtube just stopped recommending them to you or something?
Great video and how you made a rather mundane topic, A really enjoyable, B Fly by at even hour and twenty mins. Cheers again dude From me and my dog Max from the UK 🙂
1:00:17 The height would be wrong given the thickness of the tape. I'm not too surprised given the borderline prototype nature (FPGA, really?!)
Hope you're well. Love the channel!
Came for the floppy players stayed for the photography advice
every time you talk about one of these crappy old cameras I'm reminded and informed about why for so long so many youtube videos, blogs etc had the absolute crappiest picture quality
You should do a video on the CVS disposable video/digital cameras.
They were actually reusable with basic mods.
Ding! Instant watch :) thank you for more obscure knowledge I can’t use, but love to learn about :D
I'll always watch every video all the way through
I have strong déjà vu about that How to Photograph Your Family demo disk. Have you featured it before? Or maybe it was some other channel …
Me too! The bit about the off-camera flash feels very familiar.
Did you happen to see me going off about it on a livestream? I think I did that last year
oh thank god someone else remembers that too
@@CathodeRayDude I think it came up in one of your videos too, can't remember which one, but it was something to do with digital photography. That or LGR managed to find a copy of it when he was looking at another of the floppy cameras of this era too and we're all doing an attribution error.
Came to the comments looking for this. I've definitely seen that picture before, same argument last time about the flash, haha
I remember back in the 90s you could buy panoramic format disposable cameras and I guess they were pretty popular because most stores usually had at least one option for that
The grandma angle was one I hadn't thought of. Pretty much every digital camera I saw at the time had a component out (some s-video as well), so you could plug your camera directly into your TV.
We used to take great delight in zooming in to random shots, trying to find people that had no idea that they had their photo taken.
Having a through put device was a genius idea that could work for certain consumers, though
About APS encoding: there’s a magnetic strip on the side of the film
This is the centerpiece of the whole APS project: storing the equivalent of EXIF data on the film for extra automation
Oh, sick, finally a companion for my FDD Mavica!
What you *really* want is the Mavica Printer [FVP-1]. It prints! (Also has s-video and composite out.)
I would assume the floppy in the Microsoft is on foam for noise reasons and durability reasons. And the lack of screws is cheaper and maybe faster to assemble?
My gut feeling was that they wanted to use the screw holes to mount the floppy drive, but then figured out there was a flaw in that approach *after* making the moulds and needing to change something somewhere. Noise and durability checks out as what those problems could've been.
USB sticks (Flash drives).
I went to college in the span of 2000 to 2004. Everything was floppy disk, a few computers had CD burners or ZIP drives, but you were pretty much expected to save all your work to floppy disk, so every computer had a floppy disk.
When I visit the college the next year (I ended up working there) in 2005, Flash drives were finally starting to not only just become a thing (Seriously, nobody even mentioned them while I was at college as a student, I didn't know they existed), but they were starting to become a standard. I think it was about 2007 when nobody was using floppy disks (at the college) any more. (Except a few people, like me, but that was for transferring data to a specialised Windows 98 machine to control a CNC drill. But it was one of those machines with a ZIP drive, so I got a USB zip drive and used that.)
A book review of the the family photography book would be cool btw
As a photographer myself id love to see a review of it ❤
...Aaaand a healthy engine on Udon as well.
That said, I think we figured out which one is more mischievous of the bunch.
Loved this video, I enjoy the weird unique devices like these that solved such a time and place specific problem
I was JUST looking for something to watch, perfect timing.
1:14:39 Fun fact; Wayland MA is the town the Wayland display server / protocol on Linux is named after.
Design & Reuse is the defacto standard for listing asic/fpga IP - used to work in a company that advertised its IPs there.
"this isn't a book review channel", But it could be
40:40 - CRT, I *love* your sense of humor when it comes to sh!t like this! BRAVO!
The anecdote about the polaroid camera being recalled before release is incorrect according to wikipedia and it's 2005 source. It was recalled 2 days after release because of "a firmware issue" i.e. all the photos looked like shit.
And the foveon sensor was sold in about 10 different sigma cameras, and sigma eventually bought them out.
That's what they said publicly. The *rumor* is that they just didn't want the thing selling.
I know Sigma sold a bunch of foveons, but as far as I know none of them retailed for under a grand and they were all enthusiast-focused. I was saying that the Polaroid is the only _cheap piece of crap_ with a Foveon, and as far as I know that's still true.