The future is tapeless
I remember my parents first buying a camcorder some time in the 1980s. They transitioned from the noisy film-based movie cameras (that required a reel-to-reel projector for playback) to a not-so-compact Sony 8mm camcorder. At the time, I recall the salesman exclaiming his belief that the 8mm tape format would last far into the future. And it did…surprisingly long. Though supplanted somewhat by DVC tapes now, the basic concept is the same: record the video onto tape, which serves both archival and playback functions. It’s works fine if you keep your tapes labeled and organized, and if you typically like to watch the entire tape in a single sitting, but it is hardly convenient.
Look at what’s happened to photography - it’s rare to see people using film-based cameras these days, and for good reason. There’s no recurring media cost with digital images. You can easily snap one or two pictures and upload them for sharing immediately. Not so with tape - it’s impractical to digitize a few minutes of video tape at a time. The tape has to be rewound to the correct spot and you run the risk of either missing material for upload or uploading the same material twice.
My assumption, of course, that the ultimate destination of the video is the computer, but that’s clearly where this technology is heading. Bandwidth is good enough to easily share standard definition video across the internet, and even HD video is practical for those with high-speed connections. DVD-based recorders are a reasonable stop-gap measure, but you still end up with a pile of discs at the end of it. Two more exciting options are hard disk and flash based camcorders, with the latter being the more promising option. Hard disk camcorders record to a hard disk (no great surprise there). The large capacity of small hard disks enables the videographer to record 30 or more hours of footage before capacity is exhausted. When the camera is connected to the computer, the video is uploaded and removed from the hard disk.
This works well, but has a few limitations. If you’re on a long vacation and want to record more hours than your hard disk can support, you’ll need to bring along a computer (still, 30 hours is a lot of footage). More importantly, however, hard disks have moving parts and are prone to crashing, risking the loss of hours of irreplaceable video. Flash-based camcorders store video on solid-state memory, typically the same SD cards used for digital cameras. While the high-capacity cards can only store 1-2 hours of HD video, that’s more than enough for most people, and you can easily pick up additional cards if you run out of capacity without a computer handy.
Luddites will argue that tapes offer a timeless backup. With continuously advancing media technology, however, you’ll have to keep aging cameras available and working in order to play back older formats. Once in the digital realm, older video formats can usually be converted to more modern formats with ease. It’s also fairly easy to automate backups on the computer.
The main problem, up until now, has been the lack of decent, affordable SD-card HD camcorders. One of the prime contenders is the Panasonic HDC-SD5, a more compact and streamlined version of their popular HDC-SD1. The smallest HD camcorder (at least for now), this upcoming model looks to be fully equipped with the all the key buzzword features (though it loses the surround-sound capability of its predecessor). Samsung enters the fray this fall with its SC-HMX10, a similarly compact HD-camcorder. The Panasonic model offers a higher, “full HD” 1080p resolution using the somewhat contentious AVCHD video format which can compress large amounts of video into small amounts of memory at the cost of some motion artifacts and limited compatibility with editing software (notably, Apple’s iMovie recently gained AVCHD compatibility). Samsung offers the lower 720p HD resolution, but comes in at a cheaper price ($799 vs Panasonic’s $999) and uses the popular H.264 video format.
Both of these look appealing and will be available in the next month or two. The real question will be what the quality looks like once they get into users hands. Low-light video (i.e. most indoor recording) is a challenge for many small camcorders, and it will be important to see how these two stack up. Regardless, I know there’s one thing my next camcorder won’t have: a tape drive.