Mattel Vidster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Mattel Vidster is a digital tapeless camcorder that was marketed as a children's toy. It features a 1.1 inch LCD display, a 2x digital zoom, and records into AVI 320x240 video files encoded with the M-JPEG codec. The Vidster has appreciated for the unique aesthetic properties of the video footage it records. Since the M-JPEG video created by the Vidster is so highly compressed, the footage normally has constantly visible macroblocks, or square blocky artifacts from encoding. The Vidster only has auto-exposure as a method of exposure control, and also is constantly automatically white-balancing itself. This leads to very accentuated alterations in the qualities of the image, even from small changes in scene. The lens of the Vidster is also extremely small, resulting in an image with slight Vignetting of image sharpness.
The Vidster has been used for its aesthetic properties in artistic media projects by many groups of experimental filmmakers, just as the Pixelvision camera has been used to artistic effect by a previous generation of media artists.
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[edit] Film Festivals
The Pixelvision friendly film festival, PXL THIS, added a Vidster festival to its lineup, calling it VIDSTER THIS.
[edit] Influences On the Web
- November 14, 2007 -- A Vidster user on YouTube created a community known as The Vidster Corner where people of all ages can share their Vidster videos on the internet with the rest of the world.
