Sony's forgotten ‘80s VideoPhone
I couldn’t wait to show you these - a fascinating little piece of history, brand new in box…well they were until I opened them.
When I next get the chance I’ll do a Patreon catch-up video. I’ll include a word or two about the behind the scenes disruption that might result in a few shorter videos popping up in the feed.
I’d prefer to leave that for now…because today I’m able to bring you a video about one of the most interesting pieces of Retrotech I’ve acquired for quite some time. I can almost guarantee that you’ve never seen one (or more) of these before.
Comments (75)
I do appreciate that 1990's sony look on those electronics. They still replicate those with many of their headphone products, but the combination of the old white plastic & the classy font is really a awe-some sight. It looks so modern & would probably fit into most houses today - wish they still made things like this.
Finally had a chance to watch this and WOW! I had no idea this thing existed and you got three of them! This was really fun to watch and your joy and enthusiasm made it even better. Another great video sir!
I was delighted to find the raw audio in the video description, so I had a go at decoding it with python: https://imgur.com/a/7OPhizz It uses amplitude modulation at a carrier frequency of about 1.7kHz. It seems as if one cycle in the carrier corresponds to one pixel. Much to my surprise, the signal doesn't include any HSYNC information, so the receiver has to rely on counting dots across the entire image.
There’s another chap had a go with it here. https://www.reddit.com/r/techmoan/comments/nt74h1/decoding_the_picture_phone/
...anyway. (some of these comments)🤔 No doubt, given no reshuffle and not falling through cracks; i'm sure this would have found use for families or elderly relatives across country. Clever conversion really considering both the capture and display are analogue. Thanks for bringing another forgotten product back from the grave. Most interesting.
Had this been an actual success, no doubt its main use would have been to send photos of cats.
Wow, I've never seen one of these. Thanks for purchasing a few and taking us on a tour. They are quite lovely units. Did you need to do anything special when plugging one device into another? I know some modems require a dial tone / voltage inducer to get things to work without an actual phone line, but I assume these worked without that. Again, thanks for the lovely demo!
I just plugged them together with the lead out of the box, so they’re bypassing any potential telephone line issues.
Late to this party and sorry I am. Your excitement at finding these came though loud and clear! I didn't catch the still image label at first and was flabbergasted that they'd even bothered! But you are right in that this is a *great* looking device. Space: 1999 indeed.
I’m glad you watched it. Finding things like this is so exciting for me and I love to share them with people who are interested.
As always, thanks for producing a great video! This brought back some great memories. I'm of the age where I've actually seen, and used one of these devices. In 1990, I worked for a large US corporation where it was important to send real-time charts and graphs to a remote site during meetings. I don't recall anyone actually sending a picture of their face, it was used to take a picture of a graph, chart, or maybe a handwritten idea, then send it to colleagues at the other end. They worked great and added to our productivity. Thanks again Matt!
I remember seeing one of these in a store about that time, a bit bigger, looking more like the Mitsubishi type. As I recall, a year or two later, we saw one every so often on the series War of the Worlds, only (as it was "slightly" in the future) it sent still images regularly, every few seconds, and without disrupting the speakerphone audio. I just figured at the time that the technology had actually improved a tad and that the production was using an actual working model.
So cool to see you using all the features that go with it like the cassette recording and that image printer is cool also
I’m glad the video printer finally got a showing. I’ve been tripping over it for a year or two. Perhaps I should get around to showing this properly along with the other (colour) one I bought.
I remember playing with these at the "Primafoon" (PTT phone store)! Also I don't remember seeing Space 1999. Blake's 7 was my favorite show.
FAB job, Commander Koenig. Had no idea about this niche 80s tech!
So cool! I really enjoyed that video.
I see the “THERE/HERE” label on that switch and I’m consumed with regret that I never encountered one of these as a kid. I desperately want to prank and confuse its owner by removing the “T” with some acetone.
Hear, hear.
Fascinating, Mat! How did you capture the images of Martin Landau? You just held an image on your smartphone up to the camera, I guess? BTW, I've just finished watching Blake's 7 on DVD. I think I'm gonna have to get a box set of Space: 1999 next! 🚀
Yes I just held up the iPad. I do have the Blu-ray box set - but I’ve yet to watch it…I still remember the whole thing really creeping me out as a child and I’m not sure I’m over it yet.
The world would be a better place if more things looked like they came from Moonbase Alpha. I have a USB hard drive dock that I chose solely because it has a kind of retro 70s white & black style. :)
That video printer is SO COOL
Wow, I am impressed at so many levels. Firstly that you made this video. I love this type of technology. It represented a new frontier at the time and it took guts for Sony to invest money into a technology that was always going to be limited in appeal... but someone had to take thr first step. Secondly, the devices themselves are years ahead of their time in terms of design. As many people have commented, that could easily have been a device from the late 90s or early 2000s. Thirdly, Mat, you always amaze with your ability to find extremely interesting technology. I didn't even know this device existed. Overall a great video on so many levels. On a final note, I always find these videos a little bitter sweet, in the sense that the 80s and 90s (and even the 70s) represented a time, at least in my mind, of manufacturers striving to make new and interesting devices. Sometimes they failed, but failure is part of eventual success. Now that we are living in a time where most innovation seems to be in software, rather than hardware per se, I just don't get the same excitement about some new app or piece of software as I would about a new device with some cool new feature. So these videos make me both happy but also a little nostalgic for a different time.
I feel much the same way. When I started this channel the idea was to feature new tech all the time…but the new gadgets all but dried up and I had to look to the past. It’s not a good long term plan though.
Great looking devices. I suspect if a digital recording was made of greyscale graduations someone could work out the code and make audio clips to reproduce any image. Totally pointless other than for fun.
This is very likely based on SSTV — Slow-scan television: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television "It was deemed sufficient to use 120 lines and about 120 pixels per line to transmit a black-and-white still picture within a 3 kHz telephone channel." Corresponds exactly with the capabilities of this device. VinylVideo, as previously demonstrated on Techmoan, uses a similar concept. https://youtu.be/UtNGVb94TFE
You were right , that one was special. A fascinating find. I am amazed they worked at all! 👍
It’s very touch and go with a lot of old tech now and as time goes on it’ll become increasingly harder to demonstrate these things working. I’m really happy things worked out this time.
I had to turn to Wikipedia to find out who "The Mekon" were, and now my repository of (dated) pop culture is just slightly expanded. Little things like that keep me coming back!
There was also a punk band called The Mekons, presumably named after the other ones!
This is why I subscribe to Techmoan! I come for the retro tech! What a marvelous find! I was 18 in 1989 and I can just about remember what "state of the art" was back then. Fax machines were a big deal. I used a Mac to run Pagemaker and thought we'd landed on the moon. Gameboy was just coming on. Things felt like they were advancing but that we were also at the end of an era. In this case, the CRT era. And the digital age was upon us Things moved VERY fast in the 90s. When you consider that six years after this product's release, we had Amazon.com, it really seems like a big leap forward. Outstanding video! Definitely Top 10 material!
I hope it lands…you can never tell.
For the select few who bought a set of these, I wonder if any got the inevitable: "Plz send nudez" message. *slowly...:D
In the future, we'll probably all be using videophones. 🙄 Lovely video! Gutted you didn't use the time machine sequence, though. But that's neither here nor there (so what is that button for?) 😛 Thankful someone kept this laying around, so that it would end up at Techmoan's house. Couldn't imagine a better custodian.
Thanks for uploading today! It’s a rainy weekend here in NY, so I’ll be watching this shortly!
Funnily enough this has been the only non-rainy weekend here in living memory. There were records going back a few hundred years that mentioned another sunny day once, but unfortunately the books got damp.
Funny how we all couldn't wait for the video phone future and now so many younger people prefer to just send short texts to each other.
Sony really knew how to do industrial design in the 80's. What a lovely bit of kit. Like you said Mat, wouldnt look out of place as a product today - apart from the fact that it has a CRT in it 😀 Fantastic video again thanks.
I wonder how they got away with calling it a video phone.
Well it’s sending video - I just think we’ve become accustomed to ‘moving video’ now…but there was a time when still video cameras were very much a thing, similar to how a film camera could be a still camera or a movie camera.
That sounds like SSTV which can transmit pictures over audio. There are a bunch of different modes but that sounds like one of the robot ones. Can you upload the audio? I can try to decode it. Some video games (Kerbal Space Program and Portal that I know of) snuck some of those signals in that players could decode and see some Easter eggs.
the technical specs from Sony show it uses Amplitude Phase Modulation (ironically the forerunner to how DSL works) but "in band" i.e. it uses the voice frequency range. I suspect there may have been performance issues when used on long or noisy lines.
Hi Mat! I'm not much into the CRT's but that distortion seems like a magnetization ("gaussing") issue to me. Try to get a CRT degaussing coil thingy, that may help. A small one, of course. At least I think the big coil mayn't do the trick.
We didn’t have a Lumaphone, but in 1989 or 1990 my uncle bought us one of the Mitsubishi LU-500 units for Christmas. He’d also bought one for himself and my grandmother (he lived with her, having never married). We only used it a handful of times, as I recall. The novelty wore off quite quickly, as you can imagine. But, that was my uncle for you. Always getting our family big, useless gifts most years (Aside from the Apple IIc system in 1984 and then the Apple IIgs system in 1987). I still have the IIc and the IIgs. No idea what happened to the LU-500 though…
Another piece of almost forgotten tech, thank you very much Mat! A small detail I liked to see: the blue sticker on the bottom from the Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, showing the "aansluitfactor" (Ringer Equivalence Number) of 1.5: as I remember correctly, you were allowed to connect a number of devices in parallel to the phone line, as long as the sum of these factors did not exceed 5, a then standard T65 phone had 2.5, more modern phones usually less.
I live in the United States, and many phone devices from that time had a similar rating system here, but I don’t recall what we called it. Anyway, it was a measure of how much of an electrical load a device put on the phone line. Manuals would warn that if there were too many devices (and their combined rating was higher than a certain number), then one or more of our phones would fail to ring when there was an incoming call.
The small monochrome screen and solid all-in-one build reminds me of the Macintosh computers of the day, which were also cool for the time.
Sony made the 3.5” disk drives for those, too. Later units would be sourced from both Sony and Mitsubishi.
Sony were determined to make the most of their Flat screen CRTs. I believe they also used one in a Video door phone. They were also making the most of Vidicons. I guess the CCDs they intoduced on Camcorders in 1986 were too expensive for products like this.
Using the zv1?. I love mine. Fantastic videos as always.
I’m still getting used to it. I could do with looking into slowing down its focusing if that’s possible - it’s a bit too eager to focus on my hands. Either that or learn to keep my hands in my pockets.
Albeit totally antiquated and mono, it's the best design for a video photo phone I seen from the 80's. Shame two of them were glitchy, but probably lucky to get one working as well as it did. Great design though and as ever really informative and information filled video. I am sure this one will do well as everyone loves video gadgets.
It's like a peer to peer gameboy camera. I'm waiting for the comments about you hoarding them all and preventing others from experiencing the technology :D
Eee, look what the lad’s brought home now! Very neat. Nice design. Does the tape out only record the pictures, or can you surreptitiously record Auntie’s phone call?
I’m pretty sure it’s just for the picture data, but can’t 100% confirm this.
Very interesting. Hope your family are better now.
Let me just Google that
Oh, that was simple
Silly question but how were you connecting to two phones? As you had them side by side, do you have 2 phone lines? I can't help thinking I've missed something obvious
I just joined them together with the RJ11 cable.
TechGhoul 👻
Neat! The manual mentions that talking or noise while receiving an image will affect the image quality (3:53), so now I'm curious to see what happens if you say play back some music or a sine sweep, either just into the microphone or by overwriting a section of a recorded picture.
Love the Space 1999 references! That was my favorite sci-fi show as a kid. Maybe you could collaborate with a repair oriented YouTuber to fix the keystone problem. Maybe My Mate Vince?
Did you review the Atari Luma? My brain is too full of useless stuff like retro pro wrestling matches to recall everything I know I've seen you do. I recall at least one videophone video. What about the one on the cover of Popular Science in this video? Mitsubishi, did you say it was? Man. I'd love to see a showdown video of all these old video phones! 😃
The Mitsubishi on the magazine is the cheaper, less featured, direct rival to this Sony model that came out at the same time.
I can hear the excitement! A bank holiday treat! I thought at one stage, by the end of the video there would be one of these for each of the household including the Muppets. Did we get an estimate of the price?
Yes it’s onscreen during the unboxing. But only the US price.
Mat, your enthusiasm for these (and when you opened the OLED TV box, and when you repaired the ski-slope cassette player) is really infectious. What a fantastic product and another superb video.
A similar Panasonic device was used during a series of segments on Late Night with David Letterman in 1988. Calvert DeForest (a regular on the show) was sent on a doomed goodwill tour from New York to the southern tip of South America, calling into the show to make phone reports every few days and sending a snap of himself using a Panasonic Picturephone. As they went further south, the picture quality gets worse and worse before finally not working at all and they just abandon the idea. https://youtu.be/qgC79qMmymE Worth a watch for the sheer situational comedy as well, but it gets a bit uncomfortable when they get to Nicaragua, have their car seized at the border and have to catch a rickety bus into the major city....and Calvert is reduced to begging Dave to let them come home!
I always thought of blade runner when I saw this sort of thing. I think the amstrad emailer did video at some point too, but maybe I was mistaken
What an awesome find. Thanks for the journey into the past. And it's so well put together.
imagine using one of these for working from home during the "current event"
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 "rage" doesn't even begin to describe what people would be displaying. Although, CNN would likely have one more legal analyst still at work. 😏
I love these "precursor" videos.