Videoguys has just swapped to a Shopify powered New Website!
You may have noticed our website looks a little different. A New Website!
Don't worry! It's still us! We still have the same great product rage and the same great deals.
This is something we've been quietly working on behind the scenes for around 12 months so we're very excited to finally have it go live!
Our new website is all around faster, more robust and much easier to navigate. We've spent a long time designing this to be fully integrated and easily upgradable.
As with any big leap forward in tech, there have been a few glitches that are cropping up here and there that we're working to iron out. Please bear with us while we work to fix these.
Please, let us know if you find any glitches through our contact form on the bottom of our website, or directly to sales@videoguys.com.au
Iris - The Videoguys AI Chatbot
We've introduced an AI chatbot named Iris who is built into the site.
She's there to help you find products, answer questions, and let you know about product ETA's. She can even give you your order tracking details.
Iris is still learning, so we're keeping a close eye on her conversations so she can learn to never tell you the wrong thing!
A Blast from the Past
As we've celebrated our 25th anniversary this year, I thought I would take you through some of our older website designs. As the internet changed faster than you could blink, we had to keep up. So it's very interesting to look at how our website has changed over time, and the products that were offered at the time.
Thankfully, some awesome people have been taking snapshots of our website and archiving them to the Wayback Machine over the years. Unfortunately, a lot of the oldest flash versions of the website have been lost to time. But we've managed to find a few ones that give us some cool insight into popular products of the time.
2002
The earliest working archive we can find is from August 2002. This features one of, if not the oldest Videoguys logos.
Should we remake this logo?
These days were the wild west for website design. Flash player everything and many many gifs were the trend. The web was still in its infancy. Unfortunately, a lot of this version of the website has been lost to time, so we don't get to see the full extent of exactly what was on offer.
Hot Tech
Pioneer DVR-A04
Oddly enough, it was an exciting time to be in the market for a DVD drive for your tower. Considering Pioneer's first consumer DVD-R drive would set you back $17,000 USD in 1997, and that by 1999 similar drives were $5700 USD, this wasn't the worst deal. Prices on these tanked hard as DVD was more widely adopted. prices were dropping faster than you could blink. By 2002, the DVR-A04 was released and we were under $850 for a drive that was over 8-times the price only 3 short years before. The sharp price decline didn't slow down, though. Today a DVD unit like this can be bought for less than $20.
2005
The next major resesign came around in about 2004, however, the best version I could find was from July 2005. This came complete with a new animated Logo
Hot Tech
The front page shows us a range of Sony HDV cameras. HDV Cameras were everywhere, and Digital Video was seemingly unstoppable. Every good camcorder had a MiniDV tape. It was the future, you see. A digital tape was the obvious next step from an analog one.
Sony HVR-M10 HDV Recorder
This HDV recorder was basically the MiniDV equivalent of a USB Hub with an SD card reader on it.
It'd let you transfer video to and from your tapes to things like VHS players. It also had a firewire port on it, so you could link it to a computer. (This was and still is the highest quality way to transfer MiniDV tapes to a computer.)
The Sony HVR-M10 is a device we wish Sony would still make. Albeit with a USB and SD card slot instead of the Firewire port. This would solve the complicated MiniDV conversion process.
Interestingly, we still have customers asking for MiniDV products about once a week to this day. And if you don't have working cameras or players like these, it's next to impossible to easily transfer them to digital.
2007 & 2008
Our 2007 and 2008 redesigns are visually very similar to the 2005 design if you squint really hard. The basic layout is very similar, but with much more "modern" (for the time) colour changes. Gone are any flash animations.
Hot Tech
It's a bit odd to see some of the tech just on these homepages are still currently available products.
The Sennheiser HD 280 Pro, Sennheiser HD 25, RODE NTG3 and Procell Batteries are all still current products you can purchase today. This is a trend that I thought we'd see closer to 2012. But I suppose some things are so good they don't need a sequel.
2011 & 2012
For 2011 and 2012, again these designs are starting to mature and properly lock in how we want to represent ourselves.
Hot Tech
GoPro HD Hero2
The GoPro HD Hero2 is surprisingly the 10th GoPro model. This model was the follow up to the very successful HD Hero which was the first offering from GoPro that could reliably do 1080p30 video.
The Hero 2 had a whopping 11MP sensor that was over double that of its predecessor, which came in at 5MP. The HD Hero2 was also the first GoPro Model to have a 120fps mode.
Around this time GoPro were ramping up sponsorship of extreme sports competitions, professionals and athletes at a blistering pace. This model was the first domino that solidified GoPro's dominance in the 2010's. and the innovation wouldn't stop with this model. It would only be the next model, the GoPro Hero 3, that had 4k recording capabilities.
It's crazy to think that a $30 aliexpress dash cam can now record the same if not higher quality that this camera could.
2013 - NEW LOGO ALERT
It's January 2013: A new year, and a new logo. This is the logo we know and love today.
Hot Tech
Sound Devices PIX 240i Recording Monitor
Just over 10 years ago one of your only options for ProRes was this:
The PIX 240i could record 4:4:4:4 12-bit ProRes up to a whopping 1080p60 and featured a beautiful 800 x 480px 5-inch monitor. This had a cheap retail price of $3,695 inc. GST. (That's roughly $4800 adjusted for inflation)
This would record to either a 2.5-inch SSD, a CompactFlash card, or to an eSATA drive. It didn't really matter which one you chose, they were all going to be expensive in 2013 dollars.
It's very humbling to look back at these and see just how good we have it with devices like the Atomos Ninja with its max ProRes Raw of 6k30p, or the new type-c iPhones being able to output ProRes directly to an SSD connected to it.
2014
What's this? Another Slight Redesign? We've hit 2014, and decided the old homepage was the wrong shade of grey. Other than that not much of anything has changed.
2016
It's March 2016. We get the full grey-ish background that we have been using right up to the current site.
Hot Tech
2016 is when we really start to see a lot of crossover with products that can be bought today. Most of these being Microphones. Up until fairly recently there wasn't too much need to upgrade microphones. Most of the Rode VideoMic range is already out and dominating the YouTube creation space. It's not until now that we have seemingly hundreds of different brands with tons of different models of compact wireless microphones that have reignited the content creator audio space.
2018
It's February 2018 - and we've just reorganised our layout a bit. We were so happy with this layout change that we kept it for 4 years, until July 2022
Hot Tech
Panasonic GH5S
The Hotly Anticipated Panasonic GH5S has just been announced for pre-order! The sentiment at the time was THE YouTuber camera was the original GH5. Not just that, you also had to run a GH5 and a Videomic Pro. The GH5S was the sequel that gave us better low light, better slow-mo (240fps vs 180fps) and 1.90∶1 cinema recording framerates of up to 60p vs 24p the original had, just to name a few upgrades.
6 years later, this camera is beginning to showing its age. It can't record over 4k60 and doesn't have great stabilisation. But it can still do everything you could need it do in 2024, to the point where many people still use them in their everyday camera workflow.
2022 - Final Refresh
July 2022. We've just gone live with our final pre-shopify version of the website. This one was very fancy and had a couple of slight changes and iterations.
This brings us to Today!
As we transition to our new website and into our 26th year as Videoguys Australia, we're happy to say that we will always stay at the cutting edge for tech in the video and audio (and some photo) space, as we have for the last 25 years!
I hope you enjoyed this little look back on how Videoguys and the products we offer have changed over time.