Why YouTubers are using vintage camcorders from the ’90s

While cleaning out her apartment, Maddie Dragsbaek found her very first video camera.

It’s a Sony Handycam that her parents gave her in 2009. She was in middle school at the time and uploading homemade music videos, skits, and vlogs to her then-fledgling YouTube channel. Roughly 10 years later, Dragsbaek now uses the same camera to document parts of her life for her 190,000 subscribers. 

“I’ve always been a pretty nostalgic person,” the 24-year-old content creator said. “I love shooting on film cameras and things like that, so I just one day was toying around with some of the other cameras that I have around my apartment that I hadn’t used in awhile and I found that camera and was like, ‘Oh, my god, what a throwback.'”

But Dragsbaek isn’t the only YouTuber going old-school with their camera equipment. Most notably, trendsetter Emma Chamberlain, who has 11 million subscribers on the platform, started filming vibey vérité scenes with a Sony CX405 Handycam in August, romanticizing her already charmed life with newfound vintage flair. In these muted shots, Chamberlain appears cool and collected while going about her normal routine, like a self-assured indie movie heroine. 

According to Maddy Buxton, a culture and trends manager at YouTube, creators like Chamberlain and Dragsbaek have tapped into nostalgia as a coping mechanism amid the pandemic. “More and more viewers were coming online to meet very specific personal needs,” Buxton told Mashable.  

It’s this sort of nostalgia for things that maybe you didn’t experience but maybe you have heard about or seen imagery about that you want to emulate.

And even if 20-year-old Chamberlain is too young to truly remember what it was like to film on a camcorder, it might still feel comforting to her. “It’s this sort of nostalgia for things that maybe you didn’t experience but maybe you have heard about or seen imagery about that you want to emulate,” Buxton added.

Brands are banking on that nostalgia, too. Over on Vogue’s YouTube channel, you can watch camcorder footage for that retro feel. Before this year’s Met Gala, celebrities like Olivia Rodrigo filmed their own “get ready with me” videos on a handheld camcorder, while Vogue cameras captured the rest of the glam process. The videos cut back and forth between crisp, glossy images and raw, choppy aesthetics. 

“I think there’s something about it that feels more authentic and a little bit artsy to see life captured on a camera that feels reminiscent of Christmas home videos, like watching yourself unbox presents,” Dragsbaek says. “Like old videos of yourself but now.”

The trend can be traced back a few years to 2017, when Keeping Up with the Kardashians adopted a vintage motif for its new opening. The intro features old home videos of the sisters intercut with present-day footage with a vintage filter. The home videos reinforce the family vibe the show has presented for its 20 seasons. 

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Thao Nguyen, a 27-year-old YouTuber with over 30,000 subscribers, uses a variety of film and digital cameras on her channel. She says vintage cameras, like the Pentax PC35AF and Olympus Infinity Junior, interest her beyond the Y2K factor — she mainly wants to figure out how to actually use them.

In a 2019 video, she buys a 20-year-old JVC VHS camcorder from a thrift store for $20. She says that her friends told her that she could just use a filter to get the same effect, but she doesn’t want to do that. “Why would I want to replicate it when I can clearly just buy one of these and get the original OG stuff,” she says in the video. 

For Nguyen, the process of saving and uploading the footage from the camcorder is “long and tedious,” considering her camera uses actual tape, which costs about $30 for a pack of three VHS cassettes. Citing the costs and the time it takes to upload the footage to her computer, she hasn’t used the camera since 2019. Plus, the camcorder is “incredibly heavy.” So much so that the tripod she typically uses for her other cameras can’t even hold the camcorder up. Instead, she uses a heftier tripod to prop it up.

Meanwhile, Dragsbaek says using a camcorder is difficult when filming herself because it doesn’t capture a wide shot and tends to be too zoomed in. However, there are some advantages to using older tech. Because the camera is so old, she doesn’t have a problem throwing it in her bag on the go, whereas she’s more cautious with her newer, more expensive equipment.

On TikTok, where ‘90s and early 2000s nostalgia thrives, the camcorder aesthetic is a favorite among younger creators, too. The camcorder hashtag has nearly 80 million views, and TikTokkers from @vickiblundell to @elle_kae are fans of a $30 kids camcorder off Amazon. It seems anything can suddenly become romantic and nostalgic if it has a vintage look to it.

“I feel like people who grew up in the ’90s and early 2000s, that’s a lot of who are coming up right now,” Dragsbaek said. “People are just starting to get nostalgic for that time period.”

And that collective fondness for the past is ultimately a means of social connection for creators and viewers alike. 

“By taking part in these trends,” Buxton said, “you’re also joining this community of like-minded people who also remember them.”