When you think of Singer, you usually think of sewing machines, although if you are a history buff, you might remember they diversified into calculators, flight simulation, and a few other odd businesses for a while. [Techmoan] has an unusual device from Singer that is decidedly not a sewing machine. It is a 1970s-era multimedia briefcase called the Audio Study Mate. This odd beast, as you can see in the video below, was a cassette player that also included a 35mm filmstrip viewer. Multimedia 1970s-style!
The film strip viewer is a bright light and a glass screen with some optics. You have to focus the image, and then a button moves the film one frame. However, that’s for manual mode. However, the tape could encode a signal to automatically advance the frame. That didn’t work right away.
Luckily, that required a teardown of the unit to investigate. Inside was a lot of vintage tech, and at some point, the auto advance started working somewhat. It never fully worked, but for a decades-old electromechanical device, it did pretty well.
We do, sometimes, miss what you could pull off with 35mm film.
Nice n all but damn, that Swiss Army knife…. Who has pockets that big?
No one, I think it’s a collector’s edition. Mat has used that one in his Techmoan videos for a lot of years now, it doesn’t leave his little recording area.
During WWII Singer made some .45 Automatic pistols. Highly sought after now!
That would be one hell of a button holer!
I recall using one of these, or something similar, somewhere in my school days (late 1960s to mid 1980s).
oooh.. I’m seeing a micro beamer module lighting up the screen, and the speaker grille swiwel down to reveal a keyboard :D
Boombox with a film. Haven’t seen those before.
There were a variety of automated filmstrip/audio systems when I was in elementary school, but I never saw this version.
There was also a toy that may have been covered here that synchronized a short filmstrip (mounted on a cardboard strip) to a phonograph record. All styled to look like a TV. Show-N-Tell, or something like that.
I was going to comment the same thing about the phono filmstrip thing. As I recall with the ones we used, there was a bit of a flag at the top of the cardboard filmstrip frame. The strip slipped into a slot in the top of the unit and dropped down as a the story (or whatever) advanced.
I think I recall an audible tone triggering the slide advance.
I doubt my memory of this because it seems like there were just a small number of slides on the strip: for reasons unknown, 7 sticks in my head.
Aha. I’ll bet it was this that I remember.
Show N Tell by G.E.:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Show+%E2%80%98N+Tell+from+G.E.#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:126aef95,vid:-MzmVFAPhLI,st:0