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Data Storage Technology Hardware

JVC First With A HD-Based Consumer Camcorder 229

Posted by timothy from the tapes-tangle dept.
kamesh writes "David Pogue writes in nytimes.com 'The days of storing computer data, music collections and Hollywood movies on spools of tape will soon be completely gone....JVC is the first company to see that particular light. Next month, it will release its new Everio GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200.' Are tape based camcorders destined to die soon?"
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JVC First With A HD-Based Consumer Camcorder More

JVC First With A HD-Based Consumer Camcorder

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  • Why stop at camcorders? (Score:4, Funny)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:43PM (#10932022)
    I'm hoping that tape-based backup units will disappear and be replaced with something faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

    • Re:Why stop at camcorders? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:46PM (#10932044)
      "I'm hoping that tape-based backup units will disappear and be replaced with something faster, cheaper, and more reliable."

      Given that tapes are cheaper and more reliable then hard drives what are you looking for?

      • Re:Why stop at camcorders? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:56PM (#10932122)
        Is it? That depends. How much is a 500 Gb tape backup system going for nowadays? I have about a thousand gigs of storage on my home network: how much would it cost me to back that up to tape? Sure, the cost per bit of tape is lower than hard disk (although the disparity isn't as great as it used to be) but the barrier to entry is much higher: high-density tape drives aren't cheap. So, from a corporate perspective (where there are substantial IT funds to invest in up-front hardware costs) tape makes a lot of sense: over the life of the drive the savings offered by the use of inexpensive tape are worth it. For small offices and home users a removable hard drive probably makes more sense for backup purposes.
      • > Given that tapes are cheaper and more reliable then hard drives what are you looking for?

        Like many other IT Directors I'm looking and waiting for something that isn't yet available. Tape units are lacking...their capacity/price ratio hasn't kept up with the storage systems and their write speeds are a hinderance when backing up large quantities of data. In addition tapes aren't as reliable as I'd like. What I want doesn't yet exist...otherwise I'd be using it. But once it is practical you can be

  • Oh great. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:44PM (#10932025)
    Now on top of everything else I have to deal with I now get to defragment my camcorder.

  • No Mac Support? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EccentricAnomaly ( 451326 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:44PM (#10932027) Homepage
    It seems silly beyond belief that these JVC camcorders don't support Macs. Something like this would have wide appeal to the Final Cut Pro crowd...

    hmm... someone need to make a mac friendly one of these with
    an iPod dock to use iPod mini's as the removable hard drive :)

    • ...and another thing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EccentricAnomaly ( 451326 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:51PM (#10932084) Homepage
      I gotta keep complaining about how much JVC just doesn't get it. I've been waiting forever for a HD camcorder, but this thing is a dog. Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops. Keep it simple and elegant and eliminate all of the little thumb buttons and crazy menus within menus within menus that makes most digital camcorders and cameras such a drag to use.

      And no viewfinder! What are you going to do on a sunny day when the LCD is all washed out... shoot in a random direction?

      For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.
      • Speaking of viewfinders, I've noticed that a lot of the more inexpensive cameras (last time I looked, about 6 months ago) have a very large annoyance...

        They all nowadays have the nifty 2" or larger swing-out lcd panel (color). But, the viewfinder is black and white.... ?? Why not put a color viewfinder in as well!!! I have an older 8mm sony that I bought specifically because it had a color viewfinder... I guess I could deal with a B&W, but heck I'd rather have a color viewfinder than a swing-out lcd
        • $15,000 cameras have B&W viewfinders. Makes it easier to focus, actually.
          • Some professional and "pro-sumer" (ugh) cameras have black-and-white viewfinders. The Canon XL-1 and derivatives has a color viewfinder. No idea why; they just do, I think.
            • I shoot a fishing show with an XL1. The color viewfinder is actually pretty handy when you're the only crew there and you want to know what colors you're shooting without hooking up an external monitor. Especially since said monitor doesn't have any power because you're in the middle of a lake. But a B&W viewfinder really is better in most other cases, especially when you've got an entire production chain above you who are working on your colors for you. It's just a ton easier to focus.
              • you want to know what colors you're shooting without hooking up an external monitor

                I'm so sorry to hear that you've only got one eye. How'd you lose the other one?

                (I kid, I kid.)
                • Well, anyone who's shooting something with an XL1 probably doesn't have enough money to buy an external monitor, either. At least not one calibrated well enough to actually judge your colors on it.
      • For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.

        Ha, ha! If this were true, you'd expect more games to be actually fun to play, or big-budget movies to be worth watching.

        The problem with the consumer electronics industry, as in these other industries, is that they are trying to get you to BUY the damn thing. They don't care about what you do after that point, because most of the time the consumer isn't going to really know at the moment of deciding to buy, either.

        So, i
      • Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops.

        Like it or not, in-camera editing [kent.edu] is an important, standard capability, without which videographers would oftentimes find themselves at a loss. It may not be the ideal way to edit film and video, but the results can be superb [omniproductions.co.uk].
    • "hmm... someone need to make a mac friendly one of these with an iPod dock to use iPod mini's as the removable hard drive :)"

      Yum, dream coming true soon?:

      1. Hook iPod up to Canon XL1
      2. Go out an shoot some video directly to iPod in MiniDV format.
      3. Get back to lab and edit video on G5 directly from iPod.
      4. Export from Final Cut to local drive ready for encoding.

      The only missing link is a way to connect the iPod to the Canon XL1!
    • It would also be nice to have decent Progressive Scan support. I'm not sure if 720i is considered High definition. 720p is though.

      320p is definitely not high def.
    • Dude, it uses compact flash. If the Mac can't read compact flash or USB storage devices, you've got bigger problems.

  • too small (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:45PM (#10932040)
    The hard drive is too small for me.

    If I go on a trip, I want to minimize the amount of stuff I have to lug around... and when I'm on vacation, I don't want to carry a laptop around just so I can dump my footage.

    Gimme at least 120gb and then I'll start being interested.
    • That's what I was thinking. If I want to record more than an hour at best (only) quality with my DV camcorder, I bring along another tape at about $7/ea. If I want more than an hour at best quality with this thing (like at an event), I either need to lug along something to dump it to, or shell out another $200 for a second 4GB microdrive (and hope I don't need a third)...

    • Re:too small (Score:4, Funny)

      by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @03:18PM (#10932265)
      If I go on a trip, I want to minimize the amount of stuff I have to lug around... and when I'm on vacation, I don't want to carry a laptop around just so I can dump my footage.

      They should put some kind of removable media in it, like a tape drive or something so you can back up the hard drive on long trips without needing a laptop. On second thought, why don't they make camcorders that just record directly to inexpensive tapes and forgo the hard drive altogether? I'd buy one of those.

      • Why not both?? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *
        Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.

        That would let you make cheap backups on the road or offload your video whenever you ran out of HD space (just pick up a few $4 minitapes anywhere), or copy video from an existing tape, etc.

        Any of the knowledgeable folk in the DV/MPEG discussion above have technical objections or feasibility comm

  • The article misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cale ( 18062 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:46PM (#10932047)
    As is so common in mainstream tech writing, the article completely misses the point. They claim that because the camera can use microdrives (compact flash based hard drives) that it is somehow comparable to the ipod. I don't usually consider 4gb equivalent to 40 gb , 60 gb, or whatever the ipod (and other high cap music players) max capacity is now.

    To me, the real advance would be a camcorder that used a 60gb (or larger) hard drive like the ipod and directly recorded mpeg2 or mpeg 4. I don't need the thing to be microscopic, it has to be big enough to hold and have a decent battery life. Obviously it would need firewire of USB2.

    Does anyone have a camera like that coming?

    • NO NO NO! MPEG2=COMPRESSED I want raw DV video like my tape based camcorder already uses. That and I personally have no issues with tape being reliable. I guess it all depends on how you treat your tapes. If you constantly finger them or if you just stuff em in your pocket sans case, you WILL have problems. If you always put them back in their case and treat them as if they had your memories on them (Oh wait, they do....), then you should have zero problems.
      • " NO NO NO! MPEG2=COMPRESSED"

        This is true. However, I would bet that a majority of "consumers" would love to have a hard-drive based camcorder that does a good job at compression without artifacts, because they just play the images back for other family members etc, and don't edit (like I'm assuming you do....)

        Now, there's a perfect solution for everyone, and hopefully in the long term, they will remain at similar pricing points. However, if more people buy camcorders that can record 80 hours of Mpeg2 t

        • FYI, DV=compressed (Score:3, Informative)

          by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
          Yes, DV is also a compressed format, although it uses FAR less compression than MPEG does.

          Most importantly is that it does not do difference frame encoding, each frame is compressed completely independently of all others. DV is basically a Motion JPEG variant. Not the most efficient compression algorithm, but good if you need to edit your video since you can split the video at any frame. (As opposed to MPEG, which requires you to recompress the video if you want to split anywhere other than a keyframe.)
      • DV is compressed, too. MPEG-2 I-frame only is the same type of video compression as DV uses, just in a different wrapper.
        • "DV is compressed, too. MPEG-2 I-frame only is the same type of video compression as DV uses, just in a different wrapper." ... and a different bit-rate. (You care about this most when you're green-screening.)
          • MPEG-2 I-frame only has no defined bitrate to it; it can be 25MBit/s (which leaves the quality identical to DV), 50MBit/s (identical picture quality to DVCPro) or higher. DV is normally run at some multiple of 25MBit/s (so DV is 25MBit/s, DVCPro is DV at 50MBit/s etc).
    • Yup. At DV quality, a 60GB drive would hold over four hours of video.

      You could get much more video if you reduced the quality to DVD quality, but video editing programs like Premier work much better with DV - probably because it's I-frame only, and you don't have inter-frame dependencies to manage.

      Personally, I'd settle for 15GB at DV quality. That would give about the same quality (DV for one hour) as a single mini-DV tape. That would work for me, because I always travel with my FireWire-equipped laptop,
  • Yea!

    I absolutely hate tape and optical finally a company gets a clue and goes with something better, and possibly cheaper.

    Now let's hope they were thoughtfull enough to leave consumer access to the HD so we can dump the standard drive and super size it with something better.

    • Well it helps to read the article. CF2 will do nicely, though I'd rather see a larger laptop drive in the thing, or if they are going to bother with "flash memory" use either SD or CF1 instead of CF2 so I don't have to go out and buy even more types of memory.

      Also why no MPEG-4? MPEG-2 is so 90's

      • There is none because MPEG-4 is intended for lower bitrate video. It hinders the image more at higher bitrates. With MPEG-2, you get good quality video at 5 Mbits/sec for 2 hours and excellent quality video at 9.8 Mbits/sec for 1 hour on a single-layer DVD's worth of space.
      • What I don't understand is why they don't use a PC Card type 3 slot. That way you could use whatever memory technology you wanted with simple, cheap adapters. You could use 1.8" HDD's, CF cards including microdrives, SD, etc. The reason for not doing MPEG-4 is that it is more expensive to do in hardware and more expensive to process in software, then again on a $1,000 camcorder that's kind of a lame excuse =)
    • Part of the reason for tape is that you can have as much storage as you like. For MiniDV, I can literally carry a day's worth of tape in my pockets. Also you can get the footage back faster. As soon as the camera man is done shooting a tape, you give it to someone else that takes it to the editing guys who dump it to computers.

      I'm sure that as small HD's get more storage space it'll become popular for home video users that just want to shoot a little footage, but it's not going anywhere any time soon.
      • I still like the idea of non-tape media. Copy and paste is always going to be more desireable in my mind than having to convert a tape over using a third device or the camera itself. You are right to say for production work it's not going to cut the mustard, though I don't see why a laptop or pc harddrive based solution couldn't work as well as or better than tape in term of speed and quality.

        Another strategy would to be to throw in a WiFi card and you can have your "all day" capability as the camera du

  • www.jvc.com connection refused after 9 comments !! (Score:5, Funny)

    by maharg ( 182366 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:48PM (#10932063) Homepage Journal
    - is this a record ?
  • This is impressive, its also a 2MP camera as well. It can record video to CF (high speed), SD and microdrive. Damn, I want 10GB microdrives... 2+hrs in 8.5mbit/s MPEG2. Its a shame its not a HD-based HiDef camera... I'm sure it wont be too far away.
    • it's pretty cool. I can't wait (read "I will wait") until these things do H.264/AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10) instead of MPEG-2. H.264 uses about 40% of the bitrate to record video at the "same" quality, compared to MPEG-2. That will be killer.

      The mustek cameras that do MPEG-4 ASP (~60% of MPEG-2 bitrate) have been out for a while, but only use SD/MMC storage (no microdrives..) - see http://www.mustek.de/eng_/html/produkte/dv5000.ht m [mustek.de]
      • does anyone have a real world example of the videos taken by these cameras (the cheap Mustek MPEG-4 ones)? Including audio hopefully...

        I like that they're ~$100... but I'm worried that the video/audio quality is going to be complete garbage and not worth the effort...

        Anyone done a review/comparison of the popular models? Putting it all together from various review sites is limited at best... direct comparison is better.

  • Only if the disk is easily replaceable (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The problem with a harddrive based solution is that most people want replaceable media in a film (as well as photo) cameras.

    Unloading the drive to free up space just isn't good enough. Not everyone carries a notebook around and I know I'd hate to loose my previous work just because something interesting happend just now and the disk is full.

    But with easily replacable standard disks - sure thing!

  • Acronym Collision!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by jhealy ( 91456 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:51PM (#10932082)
    Oh No!
    HD = Hard Drive
    HD = High Definition

    Confusion in future Slashdot articles = imminent

  • No,not so soon (Score:2, Interesting)

    by muditgarg ( 829569 )
    "Are Tape-based camcorders going to die out soon"

    I dont think so.
    Hard drive based have a disadvantage as there is no way to increase the offered storage space( Though 300 mins of video in this particular product seems pretty good , but still if going for a vacation I may rather carry some extra tapes( which are quite cheap) than keep transferring the video to a computer.
    Also hard disc based camcorders are known to be more fragile than tape based( as well as cd-rom and flash memory based)

  • first? (Score:4, Informative)

    by oneishy ( 669590 ) <jczebota@Nospam.oneishy.com> on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:53PM (#10932097) Homepage

    How is JVC first when i spotted my eye on this 4MP Sanyo [yahoo.com] several months ago! (it was RELEASED on september 10th!)

    I'm always suspicious of companies that claim 'first' status. Are there any other companies which beat JVC out the door on this?

    • Re:first? (Score:2, Informative)

      by cot ( 87677 )
      "21 minutes of video recording with 512MB SD memory card at 640x480 "

      SD would be a funny acronym to use for a hard drive, particularly since secure digital memory cards already use it.

      • Re:first? (Score:2, Informative)

        by oneishy ( 669590 )
        The JVC can also use SD or CF (it has slots for both) in place of a Hard Drive, so they really are in the same group when it comes to non-tape storage. The JVC may also offer HD as storage medium, but does that really matter when you are claiming to be the first non-tape?
    • How is JVC first when i spotted my eye on this 4MP Sanyo several months ago!

      Gee, that must have hurt! Is it still there?

  • Holly Granola (Score:3, Interesting)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @02:59PM (#10932142) Homepage Journal
    JVC.COM is slashdotted!

    You know, IPod became very successful with harddrives, how is this different? Except that the tape was cheap storage media (relatively cheap) so this may not become as ubiquitous as HDs in MP3 players, I mean people still use VHS tapes (I haven't used them in about 2 years though.)

    I think tape is still good for backup storage and it is cheap, and it is easy to use and reuse, so it is not going away yet.

  • Tapes gone? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by October_30th ( 531777 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @03:00PM (#10932155) Homepage Journal
    The days of storing computer data, music collections and Hollywood movies on spools of tape will soon be completely gone

    Uh. I hope not.

    Tapes are the most reliable and versatile medium for massive data storage and even the tapes can't keep up with the demand.

    On my home computer, I've got 500+ MB worth of results from simulations that I would like to back up but there's just no affordable way to do that.

    And no, having the data on RAID-arrays or copying it onto spare hard drives is not "backing the data up".

    • WTF are you talking about? Copying the data onto spare hard drives IS backing it up. Particularly if the backup hard drive setup is a RAID.

    • On my home computer, I've got 500+ MB worth of results from simulations that I would like to back up but there's just no affordable way to do that.

      Dude, you need to check out this if you need to back up that much data. I use it all the time to back stuff up:

      Back up device 1 [newegg.com]

      If you want to look towards the future, you can drop a few more bucks now and buy this, it will handle your data backup needs for a long time to come I suspect:

      Back up device 2 [newegg.com]

      Keep this hush hush though... this technology is bl
  • You can get a massive HDD for 40-60 quid, a "Sony" (or other vendor) tape will probably cost you 10-20 which you will probably have 3 of, but many will have more. I think many manufacturers will look at this and notice that they will make more money out of selling tapes.
  • The hard drive needs to be removable like a cartridge with a FireWire 800 port on it so the content can be downloaded into a computer. With HD sizes getting smaller and smaller (I recently purchased a 40GB Apple iPod), it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to simply be able to swipe-in and out hard drives as they are needed. Having a removabnle cartridge hard drive also frees the camera to still record instead of downloading into iMovie as I have done with my friend's digital camcorder. Now, ALL of the cam

  • HD-based portable video-corders.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by commo1 ( 709770 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @03:10PM (#10932219)
    DO NOT let George Lucas NEAR the things.

  • I don't know if all tape based camcorders are doomed to die. Tape still has a lot of life left in it, just look at your local news production facility. Chances are very good that they are using a Betamax camcorder for on the spot feeds, etc.

    With that being said, however, I am going to be buying an http://www.aiptek.com/ [aiptek.com] aiptek digital camera for my wife for Christmas. The DV3100 model is just under $100 US, uses Compact Flash (CF) which our other Kodak camera uses, and can record up to 180 minutes of vi

  • I don't like the idea, but, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @03:11PM (#10932228)
    I have video tapes that are 10-15 years old and many have a white mildew on them, most are otherwise bad now, they will ruin the heads of any VCR you put them in. Gone forever.

    However, I have old full height hard drives from the 5160 days that I can fire up right now and pull data from 20 years later.

    CD and DVD has shown's it's miserable failings, I've lost LOTS of CD's that were only a few years old.

    It takes a damn long time for the platters in a hermetically sealed HDD to go bad when it's sitting unused in storage.

    If they can get them smaller, cheaper and more reliable, I'm on board with this. I just hate to let go of the old ways. I guess some of us suffer the Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to what we've always used and have all our eggs in..

    • Easy fix for the tapes (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @03:39PM (#10932384) Homepage
      I have video tapes that are 10-15 years old and many have a white mildew on them, most are otherwise bad now, they will ruin the heads of any VCR you put them in. Gone forever.


      Get an old video recorder, the older the better. You're looking for a seperate motor for each drive, top loader if possible, with a metal deck. Remove the top cover.

      Glue two cotton makeup removing pads (the kind *without* moisturiser, just dry cotton pads) or something similar to two pieces of wood. Arrange them so they squeeze the tape gently.

      Wind the tape backwards and forwards a few times, and the gunk will get wiped off the tape. If they are really bad, change the pads between each pass. Periodically hoover the mouldy gunk out of the machine.

      If there is something really stubborn on the tape, soak two pads in alcohol, arrange a big long drying loop (you may need to remove the head block) with a fan to blow dry it, then two "dry" pads for a final wipe.


      This works, and works well.

      • Mod parent up "informative" !!!

        Thanks, I'll try that. I have a LOT of old tapes that I would like to salvage and xfer to something else if at all possible.
        Also, Big Lots usually has 4 head stereo VCR's for $29.95 Not bad considering I paid $1,800 for a Curtis Mathis 4h 2ch back in the mid 80's...

        • Only thing to watch is that you're not smearing gunk along the surface of the tape, and that nothing scratches the tape as it goes past (bit of grit on one pad, for instance). This will show up as a horizontal line on playback. If the tapes are very dirty, do them a little bit at a time, checking the pads and replacing as required.
  • A) These camcorders use 4GB microdrives to shoot MPEG-2 video. The only reason they're doing this is for the size. MPEG-2 is inferior to DV for almost every scenario.

    B) Having tapes makes for a nice method of archiving video. Blank DV tapes can run less than $5 a pop in reasonable bulk (six packs or so), which is a pretty small price to pay for a fairly inexpensive archiving system. Granted, it's not super durable compared to data archival tapes, but it's certainly fine for inexpensive storage. I shoo
  • Does anybody know how the power requirements of running a hard drive compare to those of running a tape spooler?
  • To all the pro-sumer video camera manufacturers out there, here is how to make a good hard disk based camera:

    Leave the hard disk out.

    That's right no hard disk in the camera unit. Instead either tether it with a heavy-duty, reinforced, industrial-grade firewire link. Or better yet, use something like wi-fi, or the new faster bluetooth or even your own proprietary scheme, to record wirelessly.

    That opens up all kinds of flexibility and convenience. If the shooting is all going to be in a confined space o
    • Separate camera/VCR units were common in the early days of consumer units. Manufacturers moved away from them, presumably because they believed that consumers saw them as cumbersome. I think that belief is correct. They won't be moving back to a tethered model. (For "prosumer" or professional equipment, sure; but I don't think it's ever gone away in those sectors.) A wireless model might do better, but I think the manufacturers will still see one integrated unit as more convenient than two, for the average
      • But now there is technology to make that both cheap and useful; in particular, there is cheap multi-megabyte wireless transmission tech, and excelent video compression algorithms already implemented in hardware.

        Happens often in IT that something that fails once is a big success years later. Next time you know tablet PC will be reasonably priced ;).
  • At about 5 megabytes a second, dumping 4GB of data off it will take about 13 minutes... so dumping to laptop won't exactly be ideal if you need to keep going... you're going to have to buy a spare Microdrive if you don't want to be stuck idle while offloading data.
  • I read this review a few days ago and was impressed by David Pogue's video review http://www.nytimes.com/videopages/2004/11/25/techn ology/20041125_STAT_VIDEO.html [nytimes.com]of the camcorder, shot and edited on his way to Ohio to visit his parents. The lines between old line print media and electronic journalism continue to blur - though in a good way here.
  • Disclaimer: I work in television. Based on my experience wtih hard drive recorders, they're horribly buggy. They crash all the time, sometimes freeze in the middle of playback, especially when the hard drive starts getting full. For something mission critical, I'd rather record to tape.

  • thanks but no thanks (Score:2, Informative)

    by isecore ( 132059 )
    I haven't RTFA yet (JVC is politely yet firmly denying any connection attempts) but this really seems like a big woofing dog IMHO.

    I do a lot of videostuff (documentaries, inane little comedies, etc etc) on a semi-professional basis and this really has no appeal to me.

    First off, tapes are very robust. They can take a lot of damage and still be usable. Harddrives are not very robust (at least not in the same way as tape). Also, a camera without replacable storage is in my opinion worthless, especially when
  • I read the article and it's a fairly good review of new technology that suggests that one could edit out the bad takes to free up hard disk space. Nonetheless, one still has to dump the contents of the drie to a pee cee to edit with the material.

    Pogue writes that it will not work with Apple's Final Cut Pro or iMovie and that the software that it is sold with (for pee cees only) is really awful. One has to transfer really poorly-named files from the mini-drive. They're poorly-named because they are not dist
  • Even the editors can't be bothered to RTFA nowadays.

    These cameras aren't HD.

    In fact their quality is lower than that of standard MiniDV camcorders.

    DV video is captured at 720x480 (interlaced or progressive depending on the camera, only the high-end ones are progressive) using a variant of Motion JPEG. The compression is pretty light, so the quality is high. DV video from a good camera (good optics and CCD) is slightly better than DVD quality.

    This camera records DVD-quality/bitrate MPEG-2 (more compres
  • At least with tape the courts pretty well universally accept the premise that what you see on the tape was what the camcorder actually recorded. But digital media is too easily tampered with, and could raise reasonable doubt as to the veracity of what it is reporting in a courtroom.

  • Bah! (Score:2)

    by Pfhor ( 40220 )
    So i get to record my video from my micro camera onto a small 4gb microdrive, in mpeg 2.

    I was hoping more for a AG-DVX 100 3ccd, 24p camera that would accept some form of firewire hard drive to dump video onto, in DV Stream format.

    Wait, you can already do that.

    This is just a DVD-R camera with microdrives instead of mini dvd-rs. Its small and nifty, and I would carry it with me to shoot quick shots, but I'm going to stick with my DVX 100 for my professional shoots.
  • It took me a few seconds to figure out the article was talking about the recording mechanism and not the video quality.

    HD = High Definition, as in 1080i or 720p HDTV.

    HDD = Hard Disk Drive.

    When talking about a video camera there should be a clear distinction.
  • I can't understand why companies that make digital product like this don't post samples so we can see the quality. Even 10-second video clips would be enough to see what the camera electronics and optics can do. A few photo samples would be a good idea too. They have a download section on their web page, but all it has is a brochure in PDF. WTF? Is it so hard to transfer the images and video that their own marketing people can't figure it out?
  • why is this preferable to optical media (DVD, etc.), using technology which is less vulnerable to the shocks of field-usage?

    Recording is a basically sequential activity, and the random-access capability of optical technology is more than adequate for limited use of editing and playback which are done inside a handheld device.
  • I can see HD camcorders catching on only if the memory is removable. That way, you could switch between multiple hard drives (think hot-swappable drive bays on 1" drives or something).

    Tape may be a big hassle in many ways, but at least it provides theoretically unlimited storage? A tape fills up? Just pop in a new one! However, if you have a fixed HD, even if it can store many hours of video, eventually you will max out the capacity. There always needs to be room to upgrade the storage.

    Think about it: you

  • an hour? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportlandNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday November 27, 2004 @06:34PM (#10933483) Homepage Journal
    I can only put an hour of recording on it? no thanks.

    Plus I can gte(just did, in fact) a decent camcorder for 199.99. When you can get these for 199, then analog might be in trouble.
  • The first market entrant to equip these with 2.5" or 1.8" laptop drives (at 20-100G) in USB caddies is going to crunch JVC right out of the market.

    Truly, one has to wonder at the product managerment drones who plop (should I say poop?) these things out. MicroDrives are evidently closest in size and appearance to Memory Cards, so use MicroDrives... even though these camcorders are HUGE, and a small media format (and capacity) doesn't make that much sense.

    Apple, where are you? Take the average consum

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