A new camcorder bubbled up to the top of my priority list last week. What I found was very interesting - the industry is evolving faster than I thought, and not necessarily for the good.
My reason for upgrading is that I am using a Sony Digital8 format camera. As Sony often does, they tried to motivate the world to use their own "standard" - this is one example, the "memory stick" photo camera memory card being another. Technically good, but just not compatible with the rest of the world.
I got here by starting with those enormous VHS camcorders of the mid-80's. They were so big that you needed to carry them on your shoulder while shooting! Two alternatives eventually appeared to make camcorders much smaller: the VHC-C cartridge could be played in a standard VHS home player but only had 1 hour of recording time; the Sony Hi8 format also had a small cartridge but did allow the full 2 hour recording time. I opted for the Sony and used it very successfully for years.
When I decided to go digital I had two choices: the standard at the time was the miniDV tape; an alternative was Sony's digital equivalent of Hi8, called Digital8. Technically they were both equal - the advantage of the Digital8 was that this camcorder could also read all my old Hi8 tapes. It seemed like a good choice at the time, although it only supported one hour of video on each tape. But Digital8 looks like it is being phased out now and it didn't seem to make any sense to keep recording incompatible tapes. So I started looking for a new camcorder; I assumed that I was going to get the standard miniDV. Well, perhaps not.
The camcorder manufacturers want to sell you a new camcorder, even though your old one seems perfectly good. What are they using to motivate you? Three new technologies.
First of all is recording direct to miniDVDs. Instead of a tape, you just insert a small DVD disk, which can then be removed and played on a normal DVD player. But the problem with this technology is that the record time is cut even further (37 minutes) and even that at the cost of much higher video compression (i.e. lower quality). The second is camcorders with built-in hard drives, usually around 30-60GB. This gives you quite a bit of recording time but again at high compression rates. You can't remove the hard drive - you have to connect the camcorder to your PC to upload the files and then write DVDs from that.
Neither technology seems like a winner to me, but that is where the manufacturers are going with their new product lines. The third technological change is to High Definition. HD camcorders have really spectacular video quality, but they continue to use miniDV tapes and so again have to compress more to get the additional video on the tape. But nobody has writeable HD DVDs yet, so unless you just want to play the tape to your HD TV, you can't do much with it.
There is another issue with the phasing-out of the miniDV tape for normal standard definition (SD) use. The manufacturers have reduced features in their remaining miniDV camcorders to lower their price point and differentiate them from the higher priced miniDVD and hard drive offerings. So even if you want to buy a standard miniDV SD camcorder, you will no longer be able to find the high-end features you might want, such as an external microphone jack, manual focus and adjustment, and lens accessories.
I think that this is not a good time for the camcorder industry - clearly a time of transition. I ended up deciding not to buy at all. My Digital8 works fine, and I realized that my eventual medium for storing all my video is not going to be tape or DVD anyhow, but PC hard drives. Hard drives are huge and cheap these days; if I need to, I am just going to upload the digital video from the camcorder and store it on a hard drive. It will take about 20GB per hour of video, but that is easily done on today's hard drives.
If you are in need of a new camcorder, choose carefully.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)