Don't forget D-1 [1], which was a hybrid monstrosity. In the 1980s, it wasn't really yet feasible to handle digital video in a meaningful way. No true colour

Don't forget D-1 [1], which was a hybrid monstrosity. In the 1980s, it wasn't really yet feasible to handle digital video in a meaningful way. No true colour framebuffers at 720x480 pixels and no way to move that many bits in and out of a framebuffer fast enough, either. But digital electronics could run > 50 MHz even back then, and there were fast analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. So why not digitize the entire analog video signal, directly? D-1 does just that, sampling the the entire video signal at like 14 MHz, writing hundreds of megabits of data per second to tape uncompressed. In other words, a perfect digital copy of the analog video waveform. Same signal the camera generated. D-1 was rather widely used in production in the late 80s and 90s, and for broadcast playback. Surviving material on D-1 is quite rare today - it was a very expensive tech and tapes got reused. Here's an example though - Depeche Mode performing Personal Jesus on German TV in 1989 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELRR7rPDvh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELRR7rPDvh0 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)