We’ve seen a lot of really great camera challenges with bad cameras over the years. Philip Bloom himself got together with DigitalRev (remember them?) to go shoot a Cheap Camera Challenge with a Barbie camera. But this one’s a little different.
This is the Barbie VideoCam, an actual video camera from 2001. It came as part of a set with a separate VHS recorder. But YouTuber Max Vega wanted to turn it into a standalone camera that could record digitally, directly onto modern memory cards.
The whole idea of converting a Barbie camera into something you’d shoot with today seems quite laughable. But that 90s cheap camcorder look is back in. It’s cool again. It’s “retro” and a lot of those old VHS, MiniDV and other format camcorders are coming back into fashion.
And while this Barbie camera might have just been seen as a toy even when it was new, the footage looks pretty good. That is to say, it’s not the cleanest or most clinically perfect footage. Far from it, actually. But it presents that 90s vibe in that perfectly exagerrated way we remember.
While Max made a number of modifications to the unit, including installing a LiPo battery, USB-C charging and video output ports, the biggest change has been borrowed from world of FPV drone racing.
It’s a MiniDVR (buy here). It accepts a standard composite video signal – from your drone’s FPV camera – and then records it internally on a microSD card before passing it out to the video transmitter so you can see it in your goggles. But it can take any composite video signal, including that of a pre-HDMI consumer camcorder.
You can, of course, hook these up to any camera with a composite output. You don’t have to get the Barbie VideoCam. But it does provide a fantastic look.
I’ve got one of those MiniDVR recorders myself and I’ve been looking at older camcorders. A lot of them, even from back then, the footage just looks far too clean. Maybe I’ll have to give the Barbie VideoCam a try. Might have to give it a new paint job, though.
[via Hackaday]
