I had a dream last night about a device about the size and shape of a hand-held tape recorder - i.e. relatively flat - and made of the same material, black plastic. But instead of a conventional cassette, it took a miniature videocassette. On one side of it was a camera and microphone for recording. On the other side, a small viewing screen. I watched The Big Lebowski on the screen.
In other words, it looked almost exactly like this. Except, of course, it had the capability of recording onto a small cassette.
Is this a real device that I may have seen at some point in my life, and recalled in the dream, or was it completely invented by my dreaming mind? In the dream, the device seemed like it was made in the 90s. Did such a thing exist back then?
There have been a number of portable VTRs that resemble your dream, but they needed to be connected to an external camera. Here’s a Panasonic portable VTR that strongly resembles a camcorder without the cam.
Without the cassette, you’ve kind of described the iPod Nano. Small, can film videos, record sound and you can watch The Big Lebowski on it if you truly wanted to.
I can’t think of any cassette based devices that had the same shape. All the VHS-C, or mini-Beta, or Mini-DV cassette based camcorders I know of are in the traditional camcorder shape.
The reason for this is mainly because to achieve the shape the OP is describing, you would need a lens with a very short stack height, so it would either have to be a retractable lens (difficult to maintain a fixed aperture, slower) or a low/no zoom lens. It wasn’t really until the Puredigital Flip camera that the idea of a non-zoom consumer camcorder became truly acceptable.
