Dear Keith, thanks for your post! Interesting point of view, but I will not think so far, that it could've been a Betamax. I know what that is, and at the time in Romania no one used that format in home camcorders simply because Beta format VCR's from Sony or Sanyo weren't common at all, and rather I would say didn't exist at all in our homes. We used exclusive VHS format. It may be possible to be a VHS-C or a Video8, you are right, but not a Betamax. You see, there is an interesting story related to the VCRs and the camcorders in my country back in the sad dark '80s. Due to the rarity in nature of these devices, because they were practically forbidden by the communist regime, they got an irealistic value at the time on the black market, being the only market you could find them on. I'll give you an example. If a decent VCR was sold at the time in the Western Europe for around $500-1000, the same VCR smuggled by pilots usually, was sold illegally in Romania for 10 or 20 times its real value. It was expensive like a brand new car, and a camcorder like a 3 rooms apartment. This is true. I lived those time there in that country. On the other hand, to reply to your last line, I looked on youtube for months trying to identify the camcorder's model and the close I got was a JVC VHS-C one, but the clock/date characters are not quite the same. Here in our case the figure 1 is made like a vertical line and not like a real 1. In the JVC's case it looked exactly like a 1. It looks rather from the beginning of the '80s. So the quest is still on. Thanks a lot guys, and I hope you enjoy my comments from the sad '80s in Romania as something you didn't know about! It was ridiculous but we lived like that. Thanks a lot! Still wait that someone to solve the 1st photo's enigma. Alex