FORMAT: VHS-C     DATE: 1984 PRICE: £? [2005: £?] xxcm kg

The demand for camcorders was great in the mid Eighties, but many people were put off by the high cost. Amstrad decided to tackle this problem by offering the absolute bare minimum - the VMC100, the Reliant Robin of the video world.
Everything about the Amstrad is simple and cheap. There are very few controls, just on/off, start/stop and eject, plus a lighting switch (outdoor, incandescent our fluorescent) and white balance. There aren't even any zoom controls - the small lens is fixed focus and fixed zoom, which is obviously cheaper but pretty inflexible, and pretty much unique! The viewfinder is optical -- a little "telescope" bolted onto the side of the boxy machine -- and so naturally there is no in-camera playback. In fact there is no playback at all, nor any tape-transport buttons; to see what you've taken, or even to rewind the VHS-C tape, you had to use the adaptor cassette in your normal VCR. Just like the Betamovie BMC-100, though here the reason is purely economic! About the only "luxury" feature is Long Play recording, which is obviously useful for the short VHS-C cassettes.
The unit, which feels cheap and nasty in the hand, is powered by a 10-volt Sealed Lead Acid battery, unusual for this era when Nickel Cadmium batteries were the norm. But SLA technology is cheaper, and that was enough. Of course, these batteries are not as well suited for use in video equipment, as they gradually drop in voltage as they run down -- unlike NiCd's which stay pretty constant until they're nearly dead. Indeed, these machines gained a reputation for poor battery performance, gradually deteriorating until it only lasted a few minutes.

	But, that was probably enough, because the quality of the recordings produced was, frankly, appalling. In bright sunlight the pictures were just about OK, but indoors the colours were muddy and the resolution very low. The sound was also pretty ropey; the only sounds picked up clearly were those of the camera itself... In its favour, the VMC-100 was the first "palmcorder". Unlike the other camcorders of the day, it was designed to be used one-handed, and was small and light enough - thanks to its basic design and the use of the new CCD image pickup - to make this fairly realistic.
But the most interesting thing about the VMC-100 from a collector's point of view is how it captured a moment in history: there was a demand for a low-cost camera, which -- for a moment -- was filled by this low-budget, low quality, low-rent clunker. Like all hi-tech devices, prices quickly dropped and soon you could get a real camcorder for the same price, and the Amstrad was relegated to the cupboard-shelf of history, rising again only in temples to obsolescence like Total Rewind.
The later, and much more conventional, VMC-200