Video cameras grew out of late 19th‑century motion‑picture experiments, with the first true video‑style motion camera generally traced to 1888 and refined into electronic video cameras by the 1920s.

Early motion cameras (1880s–1890s)

  • In 1888, French inventor Louis Le Prince built a single‑lens camera that recorded the short film “Roundhay Garden Scene” on celluloid, often cited as the first motion picture camera leading toward video cameras.
  • In the early 1890s, inventors like William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Thomas Edison developed devices such as the Kinetograph, improving the capture of moving images on perforated film.

From film to electronic video (1920s)

  • The step from film cameras to what people now recognize as video cameras came with early television experiments; John Logie Baird demonstrated a mechanical television system with a working video camera in the early 1920s and showed it publicly in 1925.
  • These early video cameras converted images into electrical signals for broadcast rather than recording on film, marking the birth of electronic video technology.

Consumer camcorders and home video (1960s–1980s)

  • In 1967, Sony’s Portapak system helped make portable video recording practical outside studios, blending camera and recorder in a more mobile form.
  • During the 1980s, companies such as Sony launched consumer camcorders like the Betamovie, which combined a video camera and videocassette recorder into a single handheld unit for home use.

Digital, smartphones, and “video camera” today

  • By the late 1990s and 2000s, digital camcorders replaced tape with solid‑state and optical storage, while compression standards like MPEG and H.264 made high‑quality video easier to store and share.
  • Today, smartphones, action cameras, drones, and mirrorless cameras all function as video cameras, turning almost any connected device into a tool for shooting and instantly sharing moving images.

TL;DR: If you are asking “when were video cameras invented,” the roots go back to Le Prince’s 1888 motion camera, but the first recognizable electronic video cameras appeared in the 1920s with early television systems, and true consumer video camcorders arrived in the 1960s–1980s.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.