Now I do have one of these, I bought it in the late 90's though...

How much worse was the actual resolution/dynamic range than the “simulated pictures”?

Is that the thumbs up computer kid?!

We had one growing up. It was grainy, black and white, and had a low framerate compared to a camcorder. It was similar to old security camera footage.

I think it's Malcolm in the Middle

I don’t think that’s possible.

Wikipedia thinks the CCD in the device was 120 x 90 pixels, at 15 FPS.

Who knows what the original print of this ad was like, so we can't compare to that, but if I load the exact image as posted here, those "simulated images" are about 200 x 150 pixels. We don't know their effective res in the original ad, but if we roll with 200 x 150, that is about 2.8 times as many pixels as the 120 x 90 pixel CCD in the device produced, or about 1.7x in each linear dimension.

I reduced one of them to 120 x 90 pixels, and it looks like this. Presumably the view screen was physically larger than this will appear, but that would expand the 120x90 over a larger space, not create more pixels.

Still an amazing device — reasonably priced, built tough, used audio cassette tapes, designed for kids.

It’s been a lot longer than I remember it being but 8-Bit Guy did a video on those.

I had one as a kid. It was terrible.... Thing would eat batteries like crazy....

That is a fuckin rad haircut! \m/

Here's an actual video recorded on one. The youtube compression seems to have done a number on it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFtX_WNOtOM

Here is a less compressed one. You could probably count the pixels on this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w41ayVqVwHM

Yeah the battery life sucks, but the video is insane. Its like a horror movie...