AT&T unveiled VideoPhone 2500 last week. It’s a desktop telephone that transmits color pictures over a 2.5-by-2-inch screen. The fold-up screen, which also holds the camera lens, sits on the back like a laptop monitor. Calls travel over existing telephone lines, for the same price as audio-only calls. Of course, you have to shell out $1,449 to get the phone first. The problem-besides the price-is that the picture jerks around like an old home movie-10 images per second compared with 30 on regular television reception-but AT&T is betting consumers won’t mind. They’ll have the phones in stores by May.
This isn’t the first videophone to come down the wire. At the 1964 World’s Fair, AT&T exhibited a concept called PicturePhone, but never built it. Despite experiments since then with video-teleconference rooms and telephones that processed still photos, the basic technological problem remained: how to feed the information necessary for a television picture into narrow copper telephone wires; picture running a river through a garden hose. Now, new computer hardware and software manage to shrink the video information and allow multiple images to pass through the old wires.
Technological advances are wonderful, but does the public really want video-phones? One great advantage of the telephone is that it’s something to hide behind. Better grab a towel next time you get out of the shower to answer the
