Un-Nitpicking the Sony CCD-TR500

If you watched my video a couple weeks ago about the Indextron CRT, you saw me demo a camcorder for just two or three seconds But that was the Sony Handycam CCD-TR500, which is deserving of its own mention apart from just being a good prop, and thus you and I have found ourselves here. As usual, the story goes that I found this at a Goodwill, I picked it up off the shelf on a whim. There’s millions of these things that come through Goodwill; cheap little eight millimeter video cameras with very little to write home about but this one had enough weight to it that I took a closer look, and as usual in my stories, I discovered that it’s actually a remarkable little puzzlebox. Let’s begin with its vital statistics. It’s from 1993. and it records on Video8 or Hi8 tape, which was a very popular format from the late eighties through to, like, the early 2000s, and it has quality on par with VHS and SVHS. There were a tremendous number of 8mm video cameras made in Sony’s lineup and everybody elses, and most of them are pretty samey, there’s not really much to distinguish them.

00:53 - This one has pretty typical features for the sort. You’ve got a 10 times zoom lens You’ve got Steadyshot optical image stabilization, which is cool, but really pretty common for the era. You’ve got a stereo mic on the front, you’ve got an input for an external mic here on the back, you’ve got audio/video input/output jacks, including S-Video You’ve got a headphone jack, and a LANC remote port so you can use this thing as part of a very low cost video editing system. Um, all that is pretty much standard for any Sony camcorder in this era. Perhaps the most exciting thing on the bullet list is the LCD color viewfinder, which has lower resolution than a CRT viewfinder, but in my opinion it’s adequate for most people and fairly pleasant to look into, despite the tiny eyepiece typical of this market segment.

01:37 - Also, perhaps moreso now than when it was released, the battery technology is worth mentioning. It takes a Sony Infolithium, which, if you’re familiar with those, they have the distinction of being perhaps the most produced and cloned camera battery standard in history, and therefore new ones can still be easily obtained for very little money So if you’re in the market for an old camcorder, this one’s not a bad choice from a practical standpoint. [sfx: click] So, I’ll show you an example of it’s basic image quality. It might not look too appetizing, but analog tape always seems to have really badly crushed color, and this was shot on Video8 rather than Hi8 so the quality suffers a little. Plus, she’s just seasoning that wok - so all that food is going to get burnt to a crisp anyway. Here’s some Hi8 footage I shot outside.

02:15 - The camera zooms smoothly, it can go plenty far, the image is sharp enough for analog, the Hi8 format captures a respectable amount of detail, and the stabilization makes zoomed shots much more steady than they otherwise would be, which I’ll demonstrate by switching it off so you can see how unusable a handheld telephoto shot is without that feature. [sfx: crows crowing] Now, so far the things I’ve shown you are bog standard for mid to high end consumer video in the early 90s. The really intriguing qualities of this camera are all beneath its skin. For instance, let’s look at the battery compartment again. When we open the flap, it exposes the Infolithium pack and it’s release, but if we angle a bit here, you’ll see that the backup battery, the CR2025 coin cell which stores the date and time when the main battery is drained, is housed in the door to the main battery compartment.

02:59 - By that, I mean this is not just a spare, this is the actual battery powering the clock as we speak. There must be wires running through the hinge to make this connect to the camera, which seems like a bad idea, but since this unit is 27 years old and still working, it must not be that bad an idea. This eliminates the need to put, like, a miserable little drawer on the bottom of the camera that you have to pry out with a screwdriver and, you know, gets all nicked and marred up. Which is, um… not really all that important. It doesn’t affect the functionality of the camera at all, but designing it this way was definitely a flex on the part of the engineers. Now, let’s look at how we turn this camera on.

03:32 - First we need to select a mode with the dial at the front, which works like most other cameras of this era. Turning it to the VTR mode, which is for playing back tapes, leaves the lens cover closed, but turning it to the camcorder position opens the lens cover. And, much like most other cameras of this era, the lens flap jams whenever I turn it off. [sfx: loud tapping, banging] …but it opens reliably when I turn it on, so I guess I can’t complain that much. So now the dial is set to camera mode, but the camera won’t yet power on until you take it out of standby, and the control for doing this has been the same for decades.

04:05 - I can show you an example on this contemporary Handycam, this is Sony’s CCD-TR400 released the following year. This is the typical design - you rotate it to the on position, at which point the camera lights up, and you can press the big red record button to begin recording. In standby, the record button does nothing at all, although at least on this camera, it’s locked in place so when you go to press it with it in standby mode, it won’t actually depress, telling you the camera is off. Now, this exact mechanism is on the 2010s camera that I’m shooting this video on, but, its record button doesn’t even lock in place, you can just press it and it just does nothing. On the TR500 however, the standby switch is this flap here, and when you rotate it to the power-on position, the rotation of the switch also exposes the record button, and- this is a brilliant piece of industrial design.

04:51 - This action provides positive tactile and visual feedback, which is incredibly rare in this market segment. On every other camera which has this rotating switch, the rotational position of the switch has no intrinsic meaning to your eyes or your fingertips. You can’t feel anything with your thumb that tells you whether the camera is on or off, because the only difference between those two states is whether the switch is at ninety degrees or a hundred degrees. Now, if you memorize those positions for this specific camera then I suppose that’s not a problem, but it’s still far from ideal that the positions are semantically meaningless. Likewise, this is semantically meaningless to the eye, so you have to find this little pip and figure out which one of these it lines up with, and it doesn’t help any that the two modes are “lock” and “standby.

” 05:32 - Since “standby,” to most peoples minds means “off.” So looking at this thing is a very cognitively unsatisfying process: it neither looks On or Off, nor does it say On or Off. I’ve even seen some of these where the dot wasn’t painted, so you had to really squint to see where it was pointing, or the two dots were so close together that you really- like, parallax could make it hard to tell which one was selected. The TR500 however makes it absolutely unquestionable whether the camera is on or off, because it has this enormous red stripe that screams “I am ready to take video” and it shouts just as loudly when it’s absent The average individual looking at the back of this camera in standby mode immediately says “wait, where’s the red button?” and will assume the camera can’t be used without it. You can also feel this button, or it’s absence, so even if you can’t memorize that left means on and right means off if you can’t feel the record button under your thumb, you know instantly that something’s up. Does any of this matter? No. Not really.

06:23 - You’ll know if the camera’s on because there will be a picture in the viewfinder. Except that, everything we do costs a certain number of cognitive cycles, and vague systems introduce uncertainties into troubleshooting. If you flip the switch on your camcorder and it doesn’t come on, but the positions of the switch are not intrinsically meaningful to you, label or no, you won’t feel as confident as you should that you did definitely turn the camera on, and will probably try flipping the switch back and forth again, wasting time and undermining your confidence in your actions. That will never happen with this camera. Once you turn it on, you can be absolutely assured that you turned it on. If it still doesn’t operate, you will look for a problem somewhere else, removing this switch from the troubleshooting equation completely, which is just good interface design.

07:05 - Additionally, if you’re trying to prepare the camera to record without looking at it for some reason, you can operate this switch entirely by feel and be sure you put it in the right position. That’s an edge case, to be sure, but if you wind up in that situation, you’ll want this, not the other thing. Now those were very carefully massaged anti-nitpicks, if you will. The design of the power switch or the location of the clock battery are immaterial to 99% of this cameras user experience. This final part however is how this camera sticks the landing with me, what really puts it on the map.

07:35 - Up here at the front, you may have noticed this label that says “auto lock.” It’s a very strange label that doesn’t suggest much about what it does. Now you might think this is, uh, like, a rubber flap that’s going to reveal a Firewire port, or, or some sort of computer interface or something, but when I open this you’ll see, it’s actually a control panel. At first this is kind of bewildering, it’s one of the most densely packed interfaces I’ve ever seen on a camcorder. This is your manual focus dial, this is your manual exposure dial, and then their accompanying buttons toggle the camera between automatic and manual mode for each of those settings, and then the AE button here adjusts your exposure program if you have it in auto mode.

08:10 - Now, manual controls of this sort were not that uncommon on higher end camcorders of this era but if you’ve never used one before, you might think these are a little less pleasant to use than they actually are. Let me demonstrate that for you. You might think, looking at this for instance, that when I roll this it’s going to take quite a while to respond, but actually it’s, uh, very snappy - if I roll back and forth it responds pretty much instantly to my motions, so you can dial this in right where you want it And then the manual exposure control is also pretty responsive it’s in detents instead of in, uh, perfectly smooth motion like the focus control, but it’s still nice and snappy. Now as I said, in automatic exposure mode, you can press this button here to cycle through the exposure programs, and it’s kind of hard to demonstrate in here what that does, but at least on the Sports mode, which is the third option available here - not really sure what the other ones do - it introduces a high shutter speed mode which was also not unusual on cameras of this era, but the fact that it’s right here is a really nice feature. The purpose of a high shutter speed is to freeze motion so, for instance, if you’re shooting a soccer game, you’ll be able to pause the action when watching the video at home, and see frozen motion without any significant blur. In the normal exposure program, you can’t be assured of that, because the camera might choose a small aperture and high shutter angle - or a slow shutter speed - instead of vice versa, resulting in motion blur.

09:23 - That’s often desirable for footage that isn’t intended for being paused, but for sports and a few other things you would definitely want this. Wildlife videography is a good example - here, in this footage of some crows that I shot today, you can see that in the normal exposure mode, when they flap their wings, if I freeze the image their wings are blurry. However, if I shoot again in sports mode, their wings are crisp when the image is frozen. You can see how this would be useful for getting that perfect freeze frame of your son’s foot connecting with the soccer ball. You can also do some other interesting tricks in normal mode, the water coming out of this garden sprayer looks exactly like you’d expect, but in sports mode, you can make out individual droplets as they exit the nozzle.

09:57 - And you can think of other things this might be useful for. So again, this feature was not unique to this camera, but the fact that it’s right up here next to the other exposure controls means that when you’re shooting, everything you could want to do is right here at your thumb, it’s not scattered all over the place. If we look back at the TR400 for instance, the features to do this are scattered everywhere across the side. You’ve got the exposure controls back here, the focus controls up here, you’ve got the program control back here, so as you’re using this camera, you’ve got to look at it over and over to see where things are, because you’re not gonna remember where this button is in relation to these other ones when everything is just all so same-y. That’s what I like about the TR500’s design - it’s not that it’s really a great one.

10:38 - If you want really, you know, easy to access controls for advanced picture settings, you’re going to want to spend six thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars on a professional camcorder, but, but for what this thing is, the fact that they put everything right here where you can access it all with a single finger is better than any other camcorder design I’ve ever seen that tried to do the same thing. I mean, consider - the pop-out pod for instance, doesn’t seem necessary. They could have just taken this same clustered set of controls and put it right here on the side, and then everything would be still be right where you can reach it, but- Consider that when you’re using this camera, you’re looking through the viewfinder, and if you forget where a control is and you take your eye away for a moment, you can tilt the camera a little bit, or move your head a little bit, and you’ll be able to see sorta where things are, but you won’t be able to make out the labels. However, with the pop-out pod design, the labels face almost backwards, so you can make them out without having to rotate the camera 90 degrees and lose your shot. This is also just a physical implementation of an “advanced settings” checkbox - when it’s swung out, it makes the camera an advanced camera, and when it’s swung in, it makes the camera go back to being a basic camera.

11:39 - Again, much like the switch on the back, it’s a visual indication that the camera is in “basic” operation mode. Otherwise, you’d have to hunt around and press each of these buttons in order to try and find all the settings that are turned on to get the camera back to defaults, and that actually is a common problem on camcorders of all stripes, is trying to figure out “why is the camera acting weird, button did I turn on and forget to turn off” because they’re all pushbuttons, instead of switches. This one, however, you can simply close the door, and when you close the door, if you have the camera in any kind of strange mode, if you’ve got the exposure or the focus manually adjusted, all pops right back to defaults. Now this is a fantastic solution for an “oh crap” moment where you’re taking video of something up close, maybe with the exposure cranked down, and then all of a sudden, you know, a tiger escapes from the zoo, and you want to take video of it right here, right now - you just slap the side, and your camera goes back to full-auto. You’re ready to do whatever you need to do without having to pick around and figure out what you turned on and need to turn back off.

12:36 - Now, see, all this was not a documentary on a remarkable piece of technology - everything that this camera does is quite doable, even at the time and not terribly novel from an engineering standpoint. What is novel is simply that someone bothered to do it. As a person who spends a lot of time looking at consumer electronics, it all tends to run together into what my friends and I call: “sludge” I’ve made the remark before that at any given moment, it seems like LG has at least 50 different models of TV for sale all at once, and they’re all just sludge. Nobody puts any thought into how any one of them is designed. Who cares which one’s which? Nobody’s ever gonna go: “oh, you have an LG RE15DGLN-R1U?” “I had one too!” because there’s just so many and they’re almost completely interchangeable except for the plastic trim.

13:19 - And this isn’t new, it’s been going on for decades. If you flip through a catalog from this era, it’s- there’s just so many models, and they’re all the same! It’s incredible. They’re like, virtually indistinguishable, and- the best part is that due to the rebranding situation, a good number of these were literally the same camera in a different plastic shell, with somebody elses brand name on it. On top of that because CCD image sensors had gotten so good at this point, the picture from all of these cameras probably looks about the same, so it all just kind of runs together, and you stop looking for innovation; you don’t think that anyone was doing anything clever in any of this. Every 90s camcorder is just a Hi8 mechanism with different combinations of ground beef, cheese and shredded lettuce.

13:59 - The sludge factor gets even worse thanks to the industrial design of this era, which, to put it bluntly, um- Everything just looks like a plastic blob. It looks like they took a hunk of hot plastic, dropped it into cold water, and then just roll stamped some logos onto it. So that’s why it’s quite a shock to discover that a really significant amount of serious effort, really earnest work went into this product. There’s functionality just crammed into corners in order to make everything just a little bit nicer, like the tiny switch that’s hidden behind the automatic controls that disables them when you close them. And, when you flip the camera over, there’s actually this little tiny…

14:34 - flip-out stand, and the only purpose of that is so that when you set the camera down on a table, it won’t sit completely flat, which means if you’re trying to take video of yourself, you’ll back up from the table, and you won’t just get, like, fifty percent table in your shot. It just- just makes it that much nicer to use. Y’know, these little touches are not the efforts of apathetic clock punchers, someone cared about this object and wanted it to be special, and it’s so easy to just believe that nobody ever did anything like that in this era The blobby plastic shells, if nothing else, make everything look identical. Unfortunately, none of these elements became universal and pretty much every other camcorder was pretty much like this one - just very straightforward, not very clever. This one actually came out a year after that one, and cost more money, and as far as I can tell it’s just worse to use in every way.

15:21 - It doesn’t weigh as much, the plastic is- [sfx: pathetic creaking noises] [sad creaking noises] -little creakier, you know, it just, it just seems like somebody cared about this one and nobody really cared about this one. But I guess that’s really the way the cookie crumbles in the consumer market - If you make something really brilliant, it’s for an audience that doesn’t really recognize it most of the time, and that means you don’t sell a billion of them, and that means that your bosses don’t keep you on, or they don’t give you the time to make the next version as cool as the first version was. The pressures of capitalism ensure that only the things that contribute to the bottom line, the things that make you actual profit - those are the things that you’ll keep in and everything else gets thrown out. Pare down, pare down, and you throw away everything that does not make you fantastically and inconceivably rich. This one is better than this one, but, better is not usually what wins, what wins is what gets somebody promoted, and what gets somebody promoted is saving money. You don’t save money by making this.

16:15 - So anyway, I just thought this thing was cool ever since I got it, and I always wanted to show off this little door here, it just tickled me ever since the very first time I saw it. Thank you for watching, if you enjoyed this, it’d be cool if you could subscribe, or even throw me a couple bucks at my donation links in the description, just to help me stay motivated and afford even more interesting things to show you from eBay. Otherwise, I hope you have a good one! .