I Finally Found A Zenith VC-1800!

After two years of searching and waiting, I finally found a Zenith VC-1800 that wasn’t overtly knackered. It was covertly knackered. There was no way to know until it arrived, and I was able to test it out. Unlike the Sony HVC-2800 I paid $10 for last year, which didn’t work at all, the Zenith VC-1800 I just bought mostly works. It makes a picture; it just looks like shit. The picture is green and over-exposed. I was deflated but not in shock. The camera is 40 years old, after all.

Still, it’s disappointing because I have videos I want to make with it. Sure, I could use the Sony HVC-2400 that I bought in 2023, but it doesn’t have autofocus, which is a necessity for what I want to do. So, I just have to keep looking, I guess.

But Why A Zenith VC-1800?

My dad bought a Zenith VC-1600 in 1981, but it was stolen when our house was burgled two years later. He replaced it with a Zenith VC-1800, which he dragged out for every birthday, BBQ, Christmas, vacation, and event for the next five years.

It was not as mobile as cameras would eventually become. The camera itself was useless without a video tape recorder. You plugged the Zenith VC-1800 into the Zenith VRT-9500 video tape recorder. Then, you put a Betamax video cassette tape in the tape recorder. The VTR was battery-powered, so you could take it anywhere. It had a carrying case that you could slip over your left shoulder while you held the camera on your right shoulder. It was high-tech back in 1981.

One Camera Dies, So Another Can Be Born

On Christmas 1988, the camera stopped recording sound, and my dad never used it again. Coincidentally, that same Christmas, I got the best Christmas present I had ever received: A PXL 2000 Camcorder. I never wanted anything as badly as I wanted that little camera. I took it with me everywhere. Sure, the image sucked, and all the mic picked up was the sound of the motor, but it was a video camera that I was allowed to use. Plus, it came with a badass little black-and-white TV.

By the following summer, the new camera smell had worn off. Batteries were hella expensive, and it went through eight of them with each ten-minute recording. I also lost the tape it came with, and though I didn’t understand it at the time, it only worked with high-bias chromium dioxide C-90 tapes. I could never get it to work with any of my ordinary blank tapes. The camera still worked when plugged into a TV, though, so I mainly used it as a security camera and to prank my friends.

Back In The Summer of ’89 🎶

In the summer of 1989, my two friends and I wanted to make movies, but my PXL 2000 wasn’t cutting it. Neither of them had access to a camera, so we asked my mom if we could play with my dad’s old Zenith VC-1800, and to my great surprise, she said yes. She warned us that the sound no longer worked, which was a bummer, but we weren’t planning on making dialogue-heavy movies. We grew up on The A-Team and CHIPS. Our movies were going to be all action and stunts.

After our first day of shooting, we hooked the VTR up to the TV in my clubhouse to watch the dailies. We didn’t notice at first, but then I suddenly realized that it had recorded the audio perfectly. We had a fully functioning video camera! Until I knocked the tripod over. The microphone snapped off when it hit the ground.

We spent that whole summer making movies in my backyard. When it was time to return to school, we decided it would be best to erase the tapes. I think it was mostly my friends who wanted to do that. They were embarrassed for whatever reason. I wish I still had them. The tapes, not the friends. They sucked. When school started again, we drifted apart. We were all in different grades, and they were into sports. We never made movies again, and we never really hung out again after that summer.

It Wasn’t Just A Summer Fling

That was just the beginning of my interest in making videos, though. I set up the VC-1800 on a tripod in my room, and I practiced making special effects. I learned how to make titles on the camera, and I even got a computer program called VCR Companion for making graphics for videos.

In junior high, I would try to get friends to make videos with me, but no one was interested. The closest I got was my friend John, who only wanted to record the covers of magazines. I didn’t understand his vision, so I dropped it.

My mom signed me up for a film club at the teen center. They were going to make a movie. I was super excited to be a part of it until I showed up the first day and saw how disorganized they were. No one took the movie seriously, and they didn’t even try to make anything look real. They phoned the whole thing in. When it aired on public access, I watched in disbelief at how bad it was. I was so glad I bailed.

Videography equipment was expensive in the 90s, and because I didn’t know anyone interested in it, video fell by the wayside. I sold the Zenith VC-1800 and the PX 2000 at a garage sale around the time I met Bonnie. I also sold my NES at that sale. If I had a time machine, the first place I would go is back to 1999 to kick myself in the balls and take back my shit.

A New Era of Home Video

It wasn’t until Bonnie and I were expecting our first son that I picked up a video camera again. We bought a Sony Hi-8 about a month before he was born. I recorded everything with that camera until digital started taking over the video landscape. Around 2009/10, when YouTube started to take off, my dad randomly sent me a video camera. He said I could borrow it but never asked for it back. I started making YouTube videos with it. I was too busy and financially strapped to make videos for fun, but I found I could justify making videos if they were for my business.

The Start of My Cleaning Channel

The first video I made was to demonstrate how carpet protector works. I had a kit to demonstrate carpet protector in the customer’s kitchen, but it was messy and time-consuming, and nobody wanted to see it. I thought if I could play it for the customer on my iPad, it might be more effective, and man, was I right. Carpet protector sales exploded.

My next video was meant to answer the most frequently asked question I would get: How do you clean carpet? I showed up to a job one day to clean a very dirty white carpet and limestone flooring. The customer told me what she wanted done, and then she left, and she wasn’t going to return until I was gone. I had the camera and tripod in the van, so I took full advantage of the situation. I set up and recorded every step of my carpet cleaning process. From then on, when customers would ask how I clean carpet, I would open my iPad and show them. I put the video on my website and on YouTube. My goal was to have the job sold before the customer called, and very often, it was.

From Business to Pleasure to Business

Before long, I was making videos just for fun as well as business videos. Then, in 2020, the world changed, and I started making videos full-time. In the autumn of 2020, my mom showed up at my house with all of the family pictures, films, slides, and a box full of Betamax tapes from my dad’s Zenith VC-1800. I found a Sony SL-2000 and TT-2000 to convert the tapes with, and one by one, I digitized them all.

My Therapist Is A Zenith VC-1800

Watching all of those home movies was a wild, emotional ride. I had never seen any of the footage before. Seeing and hearing myself as a little child is the closest thing to a time machine I will ever experience. Watching those tapes did more for me than a lifetime in therapy. Seeing how my family interacted back then answered a lot of questions about my early life.

An Archival Goldmine

Every time my dad hit record, he said the day, month, year, and what was going on in the video. That made it so easy to organize all of the footage. Plus, I was able to organize the still photographs that were taken at the same time but weren’t labeled at all.

You Can Never Go Back

The nostalgia of seeing all of those old home movies made me want an old Betamax video camera. I couldn’t remember which one we had, so I bought a Sony HVC-2400. It was cool, but it wasn’t right. Then, I bought an HVC 2800. It didn’t work. Eventually, I figured out that it was the Zenith VC-1800 that we had, so I started searching for one. They are hard to find, and when one does turn up, it’s knackered. The one I just bought was the only one I’ve found so far that was complete, not obviously damaged, and offered at a fair price. Some of these eBay sellers think they have solid gold on their hands.

Will I Ever Find A Zenith VC-1800?

I bought Panasonic’s version of the VC-1800 a few months ago. It looks just like the VC-1800, but it’s made for VHS, not Betamax. Maybe I can scavenge it for parts. 🤷‍♂️ I’ll keep looking, and maybe one day in the not-too-distant future, I’ll find a working Zenith VC-1800. Then, I can start searching for a PXL 2000 and an NES and be ten years old again.