Fisher-Price PXL2000 / Pixelvision

The PXL2000, marketed as Pixelvision, was a toy black-and-white video camera introduced by Fisher-Price at the 1987 International Toy Fair. It recorded both images and sound onto ordinary Compact Cassette tapes, and after roughly one year and about 400,000 units it was pulled from the market. It is the strangest possible answer to the question 'what is a video recorder made of?' — no camcorder tape format, no proprietary cartridge, just a standard audio cassette pushed to nine times its normal speed.

The tape is the whole point of the interaction. The machine runs the cassette at roughly 16.875 inches per second instead of the usual 1.875, fitting eleven minutes of video onto a C90. Video is recorded as a frequency-modulated signal on the left audio channel; the audio commentary lives on the right. A 120x90 CCD is scanned fifteen times per second through a custom Sanyo ASIC (the LA 7306M) and written to the tape, and for viewing the camera outputs through an RF modulator to a television on channel 3 or 4. Inventor James Wickstead sold the rights to Fisher-Price in 1987; US Patent 4,875,107 documents storing video signals on an audio cassette.

After it flopped as a toy, the PXL2000 was rediscovered in the 1990s by low-budget filmmakers who loved its grainy, shimmering monochrome. Sadie Benning made acclaimed video diaries with one as a teenager, Peggy Ahwesh shot Strange Weather entirely on it, Richard Linklater used it in Slacker, and in 1990 Gerry Fialka founded PXL THIS, a film festival devoted entirely to the camera that still runs today. A unit is preserved in the Science Museum Group's collection.