PixelVision
The PXL-2000 (also known as Fisher-Price PXL2000, Fisher-Price PixelVision, Sanwa Sanpix1000, KiddieCorder, and Georgia) is a toy black-and-white camcorder produced in 1987 that uses a compact audio cassette as its recording medium. The PXL-2000 was created by a team of inventors led by James Wickstead, who sold the rights to Fisher-Price in 1987 at the American International Toy Fair in Manhattan. When the PXL-2000 was available in retail outlets, it came in two versions, one with just the camera and necessary accessories (power supply, blank tape, etc.), and another which came packaged with a portable black and white television that had a 4.5-inch (110 mm) diagonal screen for use as a monitor. There were also extra accessories sold separately, such as a carrying case. The market success of the PXL-2000 was ultimately quite low with its targeted demographic, in part due to its pricing. Initially sold for $179 ($383 in 2017 dollars) and was later reduced to $100 ($214 in 2017 dollars), the PXL-2000 was expensive for a child's toy, yet found lasting minor success with a smaller pool of young video artists as a cheap alternative to more expensive handheld videocameras. Surviving on the market for merely a year, only around 400,000 units were ever produced, resulting in the PXL-2000's eventual present status as a sought-after cult object among many artists and media historians.
The PXL-2000 consists of a simple aspherical lens, an infrared filter, a CCD image sensor, a custom ASIC (the Sanyo LA 7306M), and an audio cassette mechanism. This is mounted in a plastic housing with a battery compartment and an RF video modulator selectable to either North American television channel 3 or 4. A plastic viewfinder and some control buttons complete the device.
An ordinary cassette audio tape stores both video and sound.The PXL-2000 holds 11 minutes of footage by moving the tape at a high speed, nearly 9X normal cassette playback speed. The PXL records at roughly 16.875 in/s (429 mm/s), vs. a standard cassette's speed of 1.875 in/s (48 mm/s) on a C90 CrO2 (chromium dioxide) cassette. The higher speed is necessary because video requires a wider bandwidth than standard audio recording. (In magnetic tape recording, the faster the tape speed, the more data can be read/written per second, i.e. higher bandwidth.) The PXL-2000 records the video information on the left audio channel of the cassette, and the audio on the right.
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