Calling Dick Tracy, Your Casio Wrist Camera is Ready!

I talked about this device on one of the very early Dick's Gadget Warehouse spot. I hate to throw them out, so I have them to Leo for his mini old-gadget museum at the TWiT Brick House. 

It's the Casio WQV1-1CR Wrist Camera Watch. Like many watches this one tells time, has 5 alarms, a stopwatch, a countdown timer, and an hourly chime if you want it. But then it gets different from other watches. It also has a digital camera with 1 MB of memory. Shooting at a truly pretty low resolution of 120x120 grayscale, it was enough memory to store about 100 pictures. The Normal Mode records the 16-grayscale monochrome image that appears on the monitor screen of the Wrist Camera. The Art Mode produces "artful" two-tone images and the Merge Mode combines two different images into a single image like the images weren’t small enough to big with. There's also Visual Data Bank feature for storage of portrait, name, and phone number records. After you record an image you can input up to 24 characters of text. There was also infrared data transfer with/to a computer or another Wrist Camera. But it's limited a bit by the fact that the IR transfer is Casio's proprietary system. You can upload images to your computer for editing and archiving, and download them back to the Wrist Camera when you need to take them somewhere. You could even use your images as screen savers but who would ever want to use 120x120 image for that. About $200, plus $50 for the IR kit so you could upload photos to the computer. Later on they were bundled together for the $199.99. It didn’t create a ton of sales.

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