Sony Portapak

Nam June Paik is regarded as the first buyer of the Sony Portapak, the first portable video recorder. The first video work, which has not survived, is a recording of Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York on October 4, 1965, which is shown on the same evening at Café au GoGo. In 1986, Siegfried Zielinski demonstrated that Paik actually must have used the Sony CV-2000/TCV-2010 video camera, a combination of recorder, camera, and monitor, because the Portapak was in fact first introduced to the US market in 1967.