Sony Portapak

Two boxes and a cable

The first Portapak was two units joined by a cable: Sony's DV-2400 Video Rover recorder and the DVC-2400 camera, which used a vidicon tube to produce a composite black-and-white signal. Atlas Obscura puts camera and recorder together at 25 pounds. The price was in the region of $1,500. Set against the pedestal cameras and control rooms of the period, that was close to nothing.

The recorder did one job. It recorded, and only recorded. There was no rewind motor, because Sony expected tapes to be wound back on a CV-series home deck; a small hand crank, stored inside the hinged lid, existed for operators with no deck nearby. A four-and-a-half-inch reel held twenty minutes. Playback also required a CV-series machine, so the Portapak was rarely a one-person operation: usually one person carried and aimed the camera while another carried and watched the recorder.

The market Sony had already built

Portable video did not appear from nowhere. Ampex demonstrated the first practical video tape recorder in 1957, and by 1958 the machines were in use at NHK and at Japanese commercial stations. Sony's contribution was miniaturisation: transistors instead of vacuum tubes, two recording heads instead of four. The PV-100 of 1963 shrank a VTR to a fiftieth of broadcast size and found buyers in hospitals, schools and airlines that wanted to screen video on long flights.

The home machine, the CV-2000, was announced in October 1964 and reached the market in 1965, small and cheap thanks to rotating heads and skip-field recording, which left part of the television signal unrecorded to save tape. It sold poorly to households and well to medicine, engineering and education. Two years later the same tape format and much the same industrial customers were waiting for a version that could be carried.

Video Rover II and a shared standard

The follow-up mattered more in the long run. Sony's AV-3400, sold with the AVC-3400 camera as the Videorover II, recorded thirty minutes on a V-30H reel, played back in the field through the camera's viewfinder, and ran for about 45 minutes on its BP-20 battery. The Video History Project's record of the owner's manual gives 18 pounds 12 ounces with battery, tape and reel, more than 300 lines of horizontal resolution, and a price of $1,495 on Sony's March 1970 list, rising to $1,650 by 1972.

The AV-3400 also conformed to EIAJ-1, the half-inch open-reel standard agreed by Japanese manufacturers in 1969. Until then every maker used its own tape speed, head drum and tracking, so a reel recorded on one brand would not play on another. Interchangeable tape let schools, hospitals, agencies and the first public access cable operations build libraries. By 1971 Sony had moved the idea onto videocassette with U-matic, and the Portapak line followed: U-matic S cassettes ran twenty minutes, and later Betacam SP portapacks took the large L cassettes for up to ninety.

The artists arrived first

Video art and the Portapak grew up together. Nam June Paik had already been manipulating television sets in gallery installations, and a generation of artists used portable video to shoot, play back and show work without a laboratory. Peter Campus built Double Vision by feeding two Sony Portapaks through an electronic mixer; Joan Jonas made Vertical Roll by filming her own recorded performance as it played on a television. The virtue was immediacy, not picture quality: tape could be watched the same day, by the people who had just been filmed.

One popular story needs a warning. Video art is often said to have begun when Paik taped Pope Paul VI's procession through New York in the autumn of 1965, then played the tape in a Greenwich Village cafe. That date sits two years before the Video Rover went on sale, so whatever Paik was carrying was not a DV-2400. The anecdote is founding mythology, not a dated record.

Guerrilla television and public access

The political use followed quickly. Michael Shamberg's Raindance Foundation published Radical Software, a journal arguing that video could bypass the networks, and coined the phrase guerrilla television in 1971. TVTV and the Videofreex carried Portapaks into demonstrations, communes and living rooms. In New York, Manhattan Cable's public access department lent Portapaks to anyone who took the training, and a group called Metropolis Video used them in 1975 to record unsigned bands at CBGB, among them Talking Heads and Blondie.

The media historian Deirdre Boyle, quoted by Atlas Obscura, gives the technical reason this mattered. With film, sound and image were recorded separately and synchronised after processing; with video, "you had it all at once. It was immediate. You could shoot it and play it right back." That feedback loop, not resolution, turned a niche industrial tool into a cultural instrument.

What the record leaves open

The claim that the DV-2400 was the first portable video tape recorder sold to the public is well supported, and the qualifier matters. Professional and industrial recorders existed before it. The Portapak's significance lies in who could buy one and where it could be pointed, not in the invention of recording pictures on tape.

Two things could not be confirmed: the launch month within 1967, and any reliable production or sales total. The price of about $1,500 is an estimate repeated in secondary literature, consistent with Sony's $1,495 list for the AV-3400 in 1970, but not a figure taken from a 1967 price list.