You couldn’t record to laserdisc, right? My parents had a VHS camcorder with a selling point that it could also be used as a VCR (the recorder hung from a shoulder bag and could be separately connected to the TV). We have a lot of old home videos from that, and I remember us recording programs from the TV too.
Oh, yeah, camcorders could be used as a portable VCR. Thing was, the camcorder my dad bought used mini VHS tapes, so it was a two-step process to transfer them to the smaller tape, and then transfer it back. So the loss in quality from the two-step process was quite noticeable. It wasn’t until we got a second VCR that we could finally have much better quality copies.
I think we got one of those later. The first one they got was a monster of 1980s technology. It looks more like a news camera than anything for consumer use (although maybe not to actual news people).
You couldn’t record to laserdisc, right? My parents had a VHS camcorder with a selling point that it could also be used as a VCR (the recorder hung from a shoulder bag and could be separately connected to the TV). We have a lot of old home videos from that, and I remember us recording programs from the TV too.
Oh, yeah, camcorders could be used as a portable VCR. Thing was, the camcorder my dad bought used mini VHS tapes, so it was a two-step process to transfer them to the smaller tape, and then transfer it back. So the loss in quality from the two-step process was quite noticeable. It wasn’t until we got a second VCR that we could finally have much better quality copies.
I think we got one of those later. The first one they got was a monster of 1980s technology. It looks more like a news camera than anything for consumer use (although maybe not to actual news people).