LCD screens in cars are pretty much ubiquitous at this point, to the point now that we’re all maybe getting a little sick of them, or at least sick of every control being slapped on them. Cupholders are pretty ubiquitous as well, and have been around and common a good bit longer than screens. That means there was a period – from, say, the early 1990s to the mid-to-late-2000s – when a car with cupholders and no screen was quite common. And yet for some, there was an unfulfilled urge for a screen of some type, which is why I think this remarkable and strange product exists: a TV shaped like a beer can, designed to fit in a car’s cupholder.
Yes, that’s right. There was a time in the 1990s, a time before streaming services or genuinely convenient ways to record television (VCRs always sort of sucked for this, and digital video recorders weren’t widely available until 1999) where if you really, really didn’t want to miss any episodes of The X-Files then you had to either live your life based on some schedule decided by some network douchebag or you had to be extra clever and use something like the Casio Can-Tele.
I had never heard of these before, and information about them, which seem to have been for the Japanese market only, is quite sparse. I found out about them from this Instagram post (it’s one I can’t embed, but definitely worth looking at). You can find some for sale here and there online, or, more accurately, ones that were for sale, and its from these posts that I gleaned what little information I could find.
The Can-Tele was also known as the TV-350, which seems to be because these sorts of beer or soda cans are normally 350 ml in size. ¥20,000 back in 1994, when this thing seems to be from, comes to about $150 today, which really doesn’t seem that bad for something like this. I mean, if you’re able to find a cheaper or better TV the size and shape of a soda can, you should buy it.
The thing takes 6V, so there’s a step-down transformer for you 12V cigarette lighter outlet, and I guess if you had an old 6V car you could skip that and power it directly. There was also an option to use four AA batteries for a true wireless experience.
They clearly intend this for car use, as you can see the flyer there shows it in a car’s ’90s-style spindly cupholder:
There appears to have been at least three variants of the Can-Tele, each with slightly different can designs:
One is directly based on a Suntory Malt’s beer can – I guess they had some sort of licensing deal with Suntory? The middle one there looks a bit more like a soda can, maybe? And the one on the right feels more like a paint can to me, but I suppose it could be beer or soda, too.
I think these things are fascinating. Modern cars are now starting to be able to play streaming video content, and I even have some cars that, weirdly, will play DVDs in their dash-mounted infotainment screens. So it makes sense that this ability would have been desired before. In-dash TVs have been around for a long time before, but those are more expensive and complex solutions; a TV specifically designed for a cupholder is just a really clever solution.
I miss analog TV. There was something oddly magical about being able to pull moving images and sound right out of the air with a metal stick, no complex setup required, no servers or IP addresses or codecs or anything like that. I once gave a talk about it all, on the last day of analog TV broadcast in America, if you want to watch it.
Anyway, I just thought you might enjoy learning about this incredible footnote in the history of in-car entertainment. Now I just need to find one for sale!
This has to be around the last place i’d expect to see the casio can tele show up. I personally own two of them. I’m willing to sell you one, Jason.
Never seen this before. Prior to early to mid-90’s there were no cup holders in cars and trucks
I’m holding out for the 40oz big screen.
There’s a pretty thin list of 6V cars with cupholders.
You can still watch regular broadcast TV, it’s just digital and needs a digital antenna. Back when they first switched, some governmental organization (FCC?) even gave out analog to digital converters, so you could still watch it on your old TV. I eventually threw mine away as all my TVs became digital ready.
The big drawback is that range is not as good, and the get it or not nature of digital means it’s really easy to drop the whole signal altogether, rather than the old days when it would become varying degrees of static with weather. But there are actually more channels available on digital than there were on analog
Unfortunately, the German government didn’t even give out the converters when the analog signal was switched off in 2010 and when the DVB-T was superseded by DVB-T2 in 2019.
Many of us had to buy new television sets when theirs no longer worked with digital or DVB-T2 signal. That contradicted the “green agenda”…and the Greens didn’t give a fuck about the enormous e-waste from millions of discarded television sets.
To be fair, most of those converters were also e-waste waiting to happen. Not sure about in Europe, but in the US the switch from analog NTSC to digital ATSC also included a switch from 480 lines to 720 lines. Most people would rather get a new set to take advantage of the higher quality than use a converter box. My parents, of course, were not those people.
Doesn’t need a “digital” antenna. My smart tv is connected to my old roof analog tv antenna, which is pointed at Mt Wilson here in the SFV, and pulls in HD digital from about 140 channels and sub-channels, plus over 500 IP channels, all free. Streaming supplements that.
Ah, that’s true. I didn’t have a roof antenna, and the old bunny ears didn’t work anymore. But new “digital ready” antennas (I think always amplified) do work
I get can of green beans vibe from it. Maybe a three bean salad.
Definitely canned food – veggies, gravy, cranberry sauce
Sounds like someone is ready for Thursday. Lord knows I am.
Casio is a company that sells some of the most mundane items as well as crazy stuff like this.
I had to read the headline 4 times before it made sense to me. For a moment, I thought I was having a stroke.
Dang it Jason, the HD revolution didn’t stop over the Air signals, it forced manufacturers to adopt a new industry wide standard digital tuner. Over The Air signals are available in every metropolitan(just about) area. Instead of manually finding the spot on a dial based potentiometer, TV’s tune in automatically, strong signals. Some adjustment to my rabbit ear, metal antenna, is required periodically based on weather. Every TV since 20XX, has a digital tuner, plug in an antenna and free TV. I had an 8″ portable digital LCD TV with AC adapter for home and ” cigarette lighter” adapter for car. In garage now.
Buy cheap rabbit ears plug into cable input. Select Ant from menu and tune free TV.
Jason, I didn’t know that OTA was one of your nerd centers. A lot of vehicles had on-board TVs in the NTSC era, and they worked pretty good. But once we dropped it and went full-ATSC in 2009, a television in a car became very limited. ATSC 1.0 won’t work if you’re moving because you’ll get multipath all over the place and the TV won’t be able to decode the transport stream. It would only work if you stopped the car, which is kind of not what a car is for.
I understand that ATSC 3.0 mitigates this problem, but hardly anybody has ATSC 3.0 capability outside of AVS Forum members.
I feel like this is from a Dilbert Comic
Engineer: I have made a TV that will fit in a car. People will love it.
Lawyer: It’s illegal for the driver to watch TV in the car.
Engineer: Don’t worry I’ll disguise it to look like a can of beer.
It’s sad that Casio’s plan to sell these in America was canned. 😉
“No officer, that’s not a real beer. I was just watching TV on the road”
You know this was invented by the porn industry just like everything else in the world.
no! it is from a cartoon network called hentai
I’m going to pretend I don’t get the joke. Please don’t explain it to me here.
Me too! (but I know you got the porn joke)
Now I need that for my car.
But I don’t have cupholders…
“There was something oddly magical about being able to pull moving images and sound right out of the air with a metal stick, no complex setup required, no servers or IP addresses or codecs or anything like that.”
Radio is similar. You can take a dusty 70 year old radio, turn it on, and it plucks invisible and omnipresent waves out of the air itself and turns them into sound. Even older if you’re tuning into AM or shortwave.
Kind of a shame that there’s so little worth listening to these days.
Community radio stations are keeping radio alive, IMO. Non-profit, volunteer staff, no commercials, DJs play whatever the hell they want. They do radio at its best. Many stream via their own websites and/or different streaming apps. They are well worth listening to and supporting. (Commercial radio, with it’s idiotic talk shows and unending commercials is, yes, terrible.)
Austin, Denver, and Portland all have great commercial-free music stations. Austin has two!
WTMD in Baltimore and WXPN in Philly have paid staff, but check all of these other boxes and play great music to boot!
WXPN was a revelation when I moved from CT to Philly to go to college.
CT, where radio playlists stopped being updated in the 80s apart from some Nu-Metal.
Ironically there was a good DJ on WXPN, Kim Alexander, who had been on a CT rock station for years while I was growing up. She later had a Philly-area wedding DJ business called “No Macarena”.
KPOO San Francisco, broadcasting from the top of a building in the Fillmore district. Owned by Poor People’s Radio.
I got interested in RF engineering because I thought it was incredible that you could pick a minuscule amount of energy out of the air and send the human voice across that.
Shortwave is greatly diminished; you can’t receive BBC World Service on shortwave in North America anymore, for example. AM in cars has been discussed here before. One interesting thing I’ve done while driving at night is try to find the furthest clear channel AM station I can find. At night, changes in the ionosphere allow AM radio to propagate much farther than during the day, which would cause interference if they didn’t reduce power at night. Clear channel (not the company, it’s an FCC designation) stations are allowed to remain at full power and can be heard hundreds of miles away.
Also, shout out to 88.9 FM Radio Milwaukee.
“you can’t receive BBC World Service on shortwave in North America anymore, for example.”
Yeah, I used to listen a lot starting around 2000. Radio Netherlands Worldwide was pretty good as well.
There’s something about listening on a little shortwave radio that the internet streams can’t match.
Of course the BBC World Service itself is a denuded shell of its former self, after years of short-sighted Tory abuse and neglect. Russia and China are stepping into the gaps opened up by the BBC going off the air in various regions.
Yes to 88.9, and WMSE. I listened to WNOV in the 80s, and when they went off the air at 7 pm I could pick up a beautiful staticky CBC station from Quebec.
They played ambient music (pre new age) which, along with the French DJ created a nice ethereal atmosphere for driving at night or sitting alone in the dark.
Not sure whether to respect or scorn the commitment to the gimmick.
“Boss, the can form factor isn’t testing well. Putting the screen on a flexible gooseneck might be better. Keep the can shape for the base.”
“NO! The product is CAN-TELE! Not GOOSE-TELE!”
My respect for Torch’s graphical and story-telling skills are such that I was completely unsure when I started reading if this was about a real product or just a figment of his glorious imagination.
“Japanese market only,” so why all the English?
Japanese companies tend to use a decent amount of English in product branding and advertising
They like the vibe
This has got to be a reskinned Sony Watchman. Crazy form factor, though.
Nah, Casio had their own tiny LCD TVs starting in the 80s. All that LCD experience from watch LCDs and calculators, I assume, among other things.
Yep. I had a Casio TV with the same exact screen, probably the exact same internals too, just in a more boring rectangular package, like a cell phone thats an inch thick.
I remember the Kmart-branded 12-inch black-and-white set I had in my bedroom in the ’70s and early ’80s. The atmosphere and a location in a part of North Carolina where the VHF channel array wasn’t full allowed me to pick up stations as far away as Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Cuba, the latter almost as clear as whatever WRAL was broadcasting in lieu of Soap until its final season. (Channel 8 from Greensboro was pretty fuzzy on the color set, but we started watching it in Richmond before we moved down there, so that was the only option.)
https://youtu.be/eyCEexG9xjw?si=ROBZdw83tzYKytnC
It was fairly common—though illegal—to have TVs mounted in cars when this was out (which says something about traffic there, I guess), so this was clearly answering a demand.
Illegal to have TV visible to the driver. Our old minivan has a maker’s option audio/TV/navigation that can be set with TV/DVD visible only to the front passenger: the driver is limited to the audio controls or navigation, visible simultaneously.
Um – No.
JDM cars were/are available from the factory with in-dash TV receivers that are visible to drivers when the car is stationary – when the car moves, the screen goes back to NAV and the audio still plays.
It’s a simple and fairly common modification to remove that limiter so that the video is visible when the car is in motion.
That said – Japanese drivers are incredibly well trained and disciplined, and the penalties are so severe that they don’t have anywhere near the incidences of distracted driving we do here in the States.
.
I have lived in Japan since 1988 and like a gimmick, but have never heard of this. Another step by Jason and the Autopian towards making my life complete.
There is one on Yahoo Auctions, boxed and looking unused, for only ¥7,000, which seems like a bargain, but useless now that TV signals are digital. https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/l1160324344
That Malt’s version was probably a giveaway by collecting stickers on Malt’s cans, unthinkable nowadays with Japan’s heavy crackdown on drink-driving.
Yeah, the signal converter box would be bigger and heavier than the TV, and would probably need a lot more work to power off the car’s electrical system
Is the screen angled up? Would be tough to watch, given that most cup holders were below steering wheel height.
Nice find though, as I’ve never seen this.
The beer can version was only available in the deep south.
I’ve heard Kagushima is the Montgomery, Alabama of Japan.
Time for this Southern JDM fanatic to pack his bags!
I wonder if there’s an equivalent in Japanese to “hold my beer” and “hey y’all, watch this”.