Casio WQV-1: the world's first camera watch arrived in 2000

Casio sold the first camera watch in 2000: 120x120 pixels and 1 MB

Two guys point their wrists at each other and, in a flash of infrared light, swap a black-and-white photo. No cable, no computer, no cloud, no phone to do it with. It's the year 2000 and the Casio WQV-1, the world's first wristwatch with a built-in digital camera, has just hit the market. More than a decade before the smartwatch became a product category, a Japanese company had already put a camera where nobody had put one before: on the wrist.

What the Casio WQV-1 could actually do

The specs, read today, border on a joke: 120x120 pixel black-and-white photos, up to 100 images stored in 1 MB of internal memory, and a tiny LCD screen to view them. The joke stops being funny when you look at the date. Consumer digital cameras back then were expensive clunkers that hardly anyone carried around, and Casio shrank one until it fit inside a watch. Two units could beam images to each other via infrared, no PC involved, and there was also a cable connection to transfer them to a computer. It launched in two versions: resin for casual use and metal for those who preferred to disguise the gadget.

From 10,000 pesetas to museum paperweight

The price back then —between 10,000 and 12,000 pesetas, some 60 to 72 euros— placed the device in indulgence territory rather than tool territory. Twenty-five years later it doesn't fetch much more on the second-hand market, although other vintage models from the same maker have appreciated to figures that would discourage any collector. The engineering, however, held up: there are Casio pocket TVs from 1985 that still turn on, with the signal converted to digital terrestrial TV and an RF modulator in between. Working is one thing; being useful for what they were made for is another. A device whose whole point was portability loses its meaning when it needs a decoder and a power socket.

An anecdote remains to gauge what kind of company we're talking about. That 1985 mini-TV had no backlight: it used ambient light coming through a rear window and forced the user to look at an angled mirror to see the reflected image, which the screen emitted inverted. The earphones doubled as the antenna. Forty years later, that antiestéticat of scarcity is called a paperweight; the WQV-1, a museum piece. And the model that, according to popular lore, flew to space with Pedro Duque remains in private hands. Nobody has done so much with so little since. Nor does it look like anyone wants to.