Picocassette is an audio storage medium introduced by

Dictaphone Dictaphone was an American company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that produced dictation machines. It is now a division of Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Although the name "Dictaphone" is a trademark, it has ...

in collaboration with

JVC JVC (short for Japan Victor Company) is a Japanese brand owned by JVCKenwood. Founded in 1927 as the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan and later as , the company was best known for introducing Japan's first televisions and for developin ...

in 1985. The Picocassette was introduced to compete with the

Microcassette The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969. It has the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a cassette roughly one quarter the size. By using ...

, introduced by

Olympus Olympus or Olympos () may refer to: Mountains In antiquity Greece * Mount Olympus in Thessaly, northern Greece, the home of the twelve gods of Olympus in Greek mythology * Mount Olympus (Lesvos), located in Lesbos * Mount Olympus (Euboea) ...

, and the Mini-Cassette, by

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...

Size

It is approximately half the size of the previous

, and was intended for highly portable dictation devices. With a tape speed of 9 mm/s, each cassette could hold up to 60 minutes of dictation,Technology: The Tiniest Tape Ever
May 27, 1985, ''

Time.com ''Time'' (stylized in all caps as ''TIME'') is an American news magazine based in New York City. It was published weekly for nearly a century. Starting in March 2020, it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York Cit ...

'', Retrieved 2010-04-06 30 minutes per side. The

signal-to-noise ratio Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to noise power, often expressed in deci ...

was 35 dB. The widest dimension of the picocassette was near .

References

External links

Image of a Picocassette
(including ruler and

Compact Cassette The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company ...

for comparison), at th
Cassette Recorder Museum
*

Techmoan Matthew "Mat" Taylor, better known by his YouTube handle Techmoan, is a British YouTuber and blogger, specializing in consumer tech reviews and retrotech documentaries about technology of historical interest. Apart from reviews and tests, Ta ...

The Picocassette - Smallest Analogue Cassette Tape ever made
Audio storage Audiovisual introductions in 1985 Tape recording Products introduced in 1985 {{electronics-stub

Size

See also

References

External links