Ampex machine's high price tag. Ampex sold only about 50 or 60 ATR-124 machines, and withdrew from the professional audio tape recorder market entirely in 1983. By the 1990s, Ampex focused more on video recorders, instrumentation recorders, and data recorders. In 1991, Ampex sold their professional audio recorder line to Sprague Magnetics. The Ampex Recording Media Corporation spun off in 1995 as Quantegy Inc.; that company has ceased producing recording tape. Starting in the early 1950s, RCA, Bing Crosby and others tried to record analog video on very fast-moving magnetic tape. As early as 1952, Ampex developed prototype video tape recorders
Video Floppy under the "Mavipak" name in 1981 for their Mavica still video camera (not to be confused with their later line of Mavica digital cameras introduced in the mid-1990s, which stored JPEG images to standard 3.5-inch floppy disks readable by computers instead). The video floppy format was later used by Minolta, Panasonic, and Canon for their still video cameras introduced in the mid-to-late 1980s, such as the Canon Xapshot from 1988 (also known as the Canon Ion in Europe and the Canon Q-PIC in Japan). Besides still video cameras, stand-alone recorders & players were also available for the VF format, that