Remember when (mostly) dads lugged around camcorders and filmed everything? Every picnic, every parade, every kid on a swing? That was me.

I found the manual for my first camcorder while clearing out the garage the other day. It was a Sony Betamovie. (Yes, I was a Betamax dude.) It was the first available with auto-focus. I bought it in 1984, right when camcorders were just becoming a thing.

Before the Betamovie, most outfits were clunky two-piece monsters. A camera in one hand, a VCR slung over your shoulder like a lead backpack. I waited. I held out for an all-in-one unit. Sony delivered.

It was bare bones though. Record-only. No video out. No rewind. A B&W cathode ray tube viewfinder. You had to pop the tape into a separate VCR to watch anything. But that didn’t bother me. When I was recording, I wasn’t watching. I was into it. I trusted my eye.

I ran that camcorder hard until 1993. Switched to Hi-8 and Digital-8 after that. I filled about 25 Beta tapes over nine years. All the usual… family trips, weekends, birthdays. But the fishing trips? Those are my favorites.

Have I watched them lately? Nope. Not since the early 2000s.

But that’s a story for another time.

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