Odd. I think a good movie rocket would be a good thing for estes to reproduce.
I was told a few years ago by someone associated with Estes that they were planning to release a new camera rocket or camera payload, obviously some sort of DVR... When I mentioned this online I was promptly chastised because this information was "off the record" and supposed to be on the QT until some official announcement from Estes was made, which never materialized.
I suppose it can just be chucked up to another bit of "vaporware" that never materialized. I don't doubt this individual was honestly promoting such a product or had even developed it and had it under consideration for full production and sale, but apparently it hit a snag somewhere along the way and didn't make it. It would be interesting to know what happened and why, but I suppose we'll never know.
As for the Oracle and Astrovision, I think it was a case of "too little, too late" and "at too high a price". While the Cineroc was a fairly expensive piece of hardware in its day, (for most rocketeers, kids especially), it had two things going for it. It was the ONLY flying movie camera on the market, and adapting a regular movie camera for flight was a pretty technically daunting job for most folks (meaning there were little/no alternatives available to buy or easily adapt to the job). By the time the Oracle hit the market, we were already fairly deep into the 'digital revolution' as far as cameras were concerned, and the more technically gifted folks had been adapting digital cameras as well as film cameras in various formats (particularly 35mm and disk) for flight for some time. The Oracle's camera was also 1) not very good (low resolution) 2) not very capable (NO onboard "durable memory" making the pictures subject to loss from the battery dying, the switch inadvertantly being turned off after recovery, loss of battery power from a hard landing or vibration, etc. and 3) it required proprietary and basically unsupported software on your computer to get the pictures off the camera and display them in a "regular format". This last thing REALLY made the Oracle unappealing, as constant and rapid upgrades of computer software meant that the "camera reader" software RAPIDLY got left behind and was incompatible with newer computers. That's one of the things Mike Dorffler mentioned killed the Cineroc-- being unable to get the film strips developed commercially and/or locally, and Estes tiring of dealing with film packs. Similarly, having software that is basically unsupported and incompatible with "regular, off-the-shelf" type software, and no alternatives like freeware or shareware really limited the lifetime and usefulness of the Oracle to begin with; anyway, it wasn't exactly a cheap rocket/camera and by the time it really got out into the market, better alternatives with better resolution and memory, which avoided the main drawbacks of the Oracle, were available to a lot of hobbyists, so why bother with the expensive and less capable Oracle??
Astrovision is the REAL quandary... by the time it came along a few years later, cheap/easy access to convertible digital cameras had become even MORE freely available and modifying them for flight had become even easier and more widespread. Yet, Estes released their new camera which had the SAME DRAWBACKS as the earlier Oracle, namely poor resolution (compared to the alternatives being adapted to flight), no "real" memory (no 'durable memory' that didn't rely on the memory remaining powered up to retain the data until it could be downloaded), and what memory it DID have was EXTREMELY limited (only 3 still pics or about 20 seconds of video IIRC per flight before the memory buffer was filled up and the camera went into standby). It was a complete dinosaur by the time it hit the market (and given the similarities in the performance and specs of the two cameras, one has to wonder if the Astrovision was just a slight upgrade using the same basic electronic guts of the Oracle, just retooled slightly and relaunched as a "new product" to sell off remaining Oracle parts...). Astrovision also relied on special software on the computer to 'talk to' the camera and download the photos and store them on the computer in a usable format, which again, was one of the BIGGEST drawbacks of the Oracle in the first place. Given that by this time small digital cameras were really making camera rockets "available to the masses" it seems VERY strange that Estes released such a limited product... If Estes had released something "ahead of the curve", say a modified version of a readily available, fairly cheap camera (that they could have bought in mass quantities at deeply discounted wholesale prices) that utilized off-the-shelf memory cards and stored the pictures in formats easily readable by ANY computer using common freeware/shareware or factory-installed picture handling software on the computer, I think they'd have "cornered the market" and had a runaway success... Instead of being "ahead of the curve" and "leading from the front" they instead tried to "lead from behind" and sell a badly limited and rather outdated product that basically technology had already passed by. In other couple or three years or so, the "keychain cams" would become readily available and dirt cheap, and really open up the whole field to everybody, making "modification for flight" as easy as whipping out a roll of electrical tape and taping the thing to the side of an existing rocket... With ample memory capable of recording anywhere from 30 minutes to several HOURS of video, via readily available "off-the-shelf" memory cards, not subject to loss of data from a dead battery (well, excluding file-closing errors, but that's another issue) and with decent (for the time) and rapidly increasing capabilities in resolution and hardware quality, it really became a "no-brainer" compared to the Oracle or Astrovision, which seemed pretty pathetic by comparison...
IF Oracle or Astrovision had been released about five years sooner, I think they very well might have become "the new Cineroc" and taken the hobby by storm... as it was, when they were released, they were already just about obsolete. Had Estes jumped ahead of the curve and released something like the "keychain cams" in a custom flight-ready housing using "off-the-shelf" electronics and compatible with off-the-shelf memory and computer programs/freeware/shareware or whatever (using common formats) I think they could have had a "Cineroc II" that would have been as successful, if not more so, than the first...
Oh well... seems Estes has given up on the camera market... too little, too late.
Later! OL JR
