Sony Ruvi

~ the obit ~

Ruvi is short for Recording Unit by Video, which tells you the naming was done by engineers rather than by the marketing floor. Sony released it in 1998 as an analog video camera that also shot stills, and its reason to exist was size. It measured 124 by 66 by 44.1 millimeters and weighed 380 grams, and in 1998 that was small enough to put a camcorder in a shirt pocket, which no other camcorder on the market could claim.

Getting there took one big decision. In a normal tape camera, a loading mechanism pulls the tape out of the cassette and threads it around a spinning head drum, and that mechanism is a large part of what sets the minimum size of the body. Sony deleted it. The Ruvi's cartridge held thirty minutes of Hi8 tape already wrapped around a helical scan record head, with the head built into the cartridge itself. Nothing had to be threaded, because the tape and the thing that read it were shipped as one object.

It was a clever piece of engineering, and it was over in about a year. Only the one model was ever made, the CCD-CR1, and Sony discontinued the system in 1999 after a brief run in the United States and the United Kingdom.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cartridge ~

The cartridge is where the whole thing turns. Putting the record head inside it meant that every time you bought a tape you were also buying a new head, which is expensive for a consumable and strange for a camcorder. Sony's own position was that the cartridge counted as a service part rather than as removable media: you could replace it, but it was not there to be swapped out the way you swap a cassette.

So the smallest camcorder anybody had made was also a camcorder with effectively thirty minutes of tape in it. You could not carry three spares in a jacket pocket and keep shooting, which is the exact use case that a pocketable camera creates in the first place.

~ what else was in there ~

The rest of the spec sheet reads like a company showing off. Sony packed the electronics at unusual density and drove the zoom optics through mechanical linkages to save space, behind a color reflective LCD. It could hold up to 350 still images on the cartridge, each one able to carry up to five seconds of audio attached to it. A search function paged through them in sequence. There was an End Search button that would run the tape to the end of the recorded material on its own so you did not overwrite anything.

Still photos with five seconds of sound stapled to each one is an idea a few years early. It is roughly what a phone does now when it records the moment on either side of a picture, arriving in 1998 on Hi8 tape.

~ the distance ~

I was fourteen in 1998 and on a 33.6k modem at home in Turkey, and the Ruvi went on sale in two countries that were not mine. It was never going to reach me even as a thing to want. The camcorder that existed in my world was a bulky one somebody's father owned and brought out at weddings, and the small ones only became normal much later, by which point they were digital and had no tape in them at all. The Ruvi is the kind of dead product you only meet through a specification, which is why the numbers are doing all the work up there.

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