Rhythm Watch Co. Visimo (1994)

Rhythm Watch Co., Ltd., a company more known for all sorts of clocks and watches, already filed a trademark for their brand VISIMO in 1993 but it was abandoned a year later because no statement of use was filed. Multiple websites (e.g. cocolog) point towards 1994 which means that if the camera was marketed in 1994 it could have been the world's first consumer digital camera with LCD screen, one year before the Casio QV-10 hit the streets.

I found a note in one of my TXT files that reads "actually sold in Japan" but I can't find the source anymore. Oh, yeah, found it, according to Taroh Sasaki's hobby website it was his first digital camera before he bought in May, 1995 before he switched to the Ricoh RDC-1.

The camera is also mentioned in an article of the New Scientist, Issue 1927, May 1994, p23. If we can figure out whether it was marketed in 1994 or not than we can prove that it was the world's first digital camera with an LCD. Marketed a year before the Casio QV-10. The Dictionary of Multimedia & Internet also associates this camera with the year 1994. They can't ALL be wrong.....

Sidenote: I know how the 1997 error came into existence. Future Image Inc. printed a list of all the digital cameras they knew. Author Akira Kasai wrote a book the same year called Essentials of Digital Photography and printed the list. So most people believed the Rhythm Watch Visimo came out in 1997! Which to me is the result of sloppy research and poor thinking.