Digital cameras had a rather rocky start in the '90s. Besides their stratospheric cost, sensor quality left much to be desired, and so did their storage capacity. However, in 1995, a company called Play decided to tackle that challenge from another angle: with an adapter that could capture video frames on a computer through the parallel port. The Snappy Video Snapshot essentially turned every camcorder, television, and VCR into a digital camera, at a very reasonable price.
For Amiga computer users, NewTek's Video Toaster needs no introduction, but if you've never had the chance to use that classic Commodore system, suffice it to say that the Video Toaster changed forever the way multimedia content was created. One of the masterminds behind the Video Toaster was Paul Montgomery, part of the "Bad Boys of Video" at NewTek alongside Tim Jenison, the original designer of the Video Toaster.
In 1994, Montgomery left his position as vice president at NewTek. Apparently, Jenison wasn't recognizing the imminent collapse of Commodore quickly enough, and Montgomery, along with much of the programming and marketing team at NewTek, founded Play, a company entirely focused on developing video solutions for Microsoft Windows. Their first product? The Snappy Video Snapshot.
Snappy Video Snapshot: A Frame Revolution in the '90s
The video published by VWestlife (perhaps you remember him from his experiments with JPG images on a 286) provides an excellent opportunity to review the virtues and limitations of the Snappy Video Snapshot. As its name suggests, the device is a "frame grabber", a frame capture device for frames from any RCA-compatible source. The potential was enormous: a traditional camcorder could function as a digital camera, but Snappy also captured frames from a TV signal, a game console, or a VCR.
One of the main advantages of the Snappy Video Snapshot was its interface: by connecting to the computer's parallel port, any user could install it. The only major technical requirement (besides installing the corresponding software) was replacing a 9-volt battery inside. Unfortunately, the Snappy Video Snapshot never offered passthrough for the parallel port in any of its versions (only the software changed; the hardware stayed the same), and if someone wanted to print, they had to unplug it each time, install a switch, or simply add an LPT2 port.
VWestlife's demo uses a Sharp camcorder from 1994 and the original Snappy Video Snapshot software for Windows 3.1. The maximum supported resolution was 1500 x 1125 pixels in 16.7 million colors, something staggering at the time. Logically, the adapter has more difficulty capturing images from a VHS tape during playback, and it also lacks multistandard support. Even so, VWestlife managed to obtain video from the Snappy Video Snapshot by processing 60 frames saved in BMP format, about two seconds.
The demo ends with a newer version of the software running on Windows XP, which, in addition to adding additional formats, also includes video recording... at 2 frames per second via the parallel port. The story of the Snappy Video Snapshot and Play ends on a tragic note, because Paul Montgomery died in June 1999 after a heart attack. The company couldn't continue without him, and the remaining Snappy devices were sold off at huge discounts. If you want one, you can probably find good deals on eBay.
