RCA was one of the first brands to sell a camcorder that took a full-size VHS cassette. In 1985 Panasonic, RCA and Hitachi all started making them, and the CC421 carries that idea into the mid-90s: its manual dates from 1995, and the tape it records on is the same one your VCR took. That makes it big. It weighs 4.4 pounds before you load a tape and runs on 9.6-volt lead-acid battery packs. In return, its tapes play in any VHS deck with no adapter, and you get a 12x zoom, a titler, fades, a macro setting and a flying erase head for clean joins between scenes. By then the RCA name belonged to Thomson Consumer Electronics, whose name is on the manual.
Tape check
Should come with it
Check the listing photos against this list, and ask the seller about anything you can’t see. A missing piece should come off the price.
No model-specific faults are documented. Its lead-acid packs are about 30 years old now, so expect to need power, and a camera that only powers on hasn't proved its tape transport works.
New to old camcorders? How to check a used camcorder covers the tape transport, heads, screens and power, and getting footage off a camcorder explains FireWire and analog capture.
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