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First HDD MPEG4 Video Camcorder
An anonymous reader submits "This is a few weeks old but we have to talk about
this. Samsung introduced the world first hard disk drive based camcorder so you don't have to buy those MiniDV, Hi8s, and DVD-Rs. You take pictures, play MP3s, PAL+NTSC video! The picture quality is 350K so not a replacement for digital camera. The downside is the HDD size is 1.5 Gig so you can record video just over an hour! Why can't these bozos let us put a 40gig 2.5 IDE drive and let us record continuously for 25+ hours! Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?"
My Sony Digital 8 Handycam can store 60 minutes of video on a standard 8mm or Hi-8mm tape. Now, forgive me if my math is wrong, but I know that approximately 4 gigs of hard drive space is used when I download approximately 20 minutes of video (it's actually 18, but for my calculuations, 20 is easier). I'm assuming this means that around 12 gigs of data can be stored on an 8mm tape. If I could get a camcorder that would store MPEG-4 video on an 8mm tape, I could store around 8 hours of video on a single 8mm tape.
The advantage that I see to using tape, is that I can easily archive and store the video. If I have to backup my video from a hard drive on the camcorder to a hard drive on my system, I will be quickly running out of room. Yes, I could back it up to CD or DVD (if I had a DVD burner), but that's extra work I don't want to have to deal with.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
But yeah, never attribute to "the cold hard facts" what you can more easily attribute to a vast conspiracy theory. Absolutely.
It might be nice to have 25+ hours of recording capability, but try finding a battery that will let you do that. You're gonna have to swap batteries or plug in for extended use (or carry around one huge battery for that).
I'd also be concerned about file size limitations... if grandma and grandpa get one of these and try to transfer the file to a machine running win me or something, you don't want them to deal with the 2 GB file size limitations, etc...
Otherwise, yes, 25 hours of recording time may be useful... but is worth recording with a camcorder for 25 hours?
As someone else mentioned already for this article, because they are handheld. Hard drives usually don't like to be moved/impacted/bumped around when they are running.
I don't think the normal IDE PC HD would work as well as you imagine in something like a digital camcorder. If you've ever watched a video that any female has made ever you'll notice the camera bounces around more than a kangaroo in a crappy B-movie. All that wear and tear would kill a normal HD, so they have to make tougher ones, which are more expensive, yadda yadda yadda
~ now you know
Personally, I'd love one. I currently own a Sony PC9e miniDV thingy, and it's excellent. This look better though. An annoyance I have is the capture time - basically, it dumps camcorder footage out to the firewire port at x1 speed. This device would overcome the 1x playback limitation. As the article says, it would also stop me getting through tapes at an ungodly speed. Plus there's the benefit that each clip has already been stored seperately, so no more sitting at the editing software checking the results of basic imports.
Isn't anyone pleased to see this except me? Lighten up! This thing is cool.
Cheers,
Ian
This whole "the batteries wouldn't last long enough if the HD could store more" doesn't fly. ACCE$$ORIE$. They want you to buy as much crap as possible, so they therefore want you to buy batteries. Back in the day we had a VHS camcorder (one of those big honkers) and we kept 3 batteries around for it. What if you are taping and you need more time? Swap the tape and battery when needed, and keep going. It's that simple. If you had more HD space in this and the battery went dead, you could just throw another battery on it. No biggie. My guess is that they don't want to compete too much with their old inventory. Kind of like the recent "HP: we're-not-going-to-benchmark-the-alpha-if-it's-fas ter-than-the-Itanium's-we're-selling" deal. I didn't read the article, but it seems reasonable. They have other camcorders that have about this time limit to them and they don't want to be stuck with them. If they release a 20 hour model, who is going to buy the other 2 million 1.5 hour models sitting in the warehouse?
Corporations are in competition, but sometimes I think they don't want to set the bar too high, else they will have problems reaching it on the next new product run. I think these corps don't want to do the best thing they can, they just want to do better than the other guy.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?
Of course there's a conspiracy to limit recording time. If you could record for an hour and a half or more then someone might carry one into a movie theater and record it. Therefore the public is not allowed to own a device with that capability. Any manufacture who sells one is guilty of contributory infringement.
Welcome to hell. It may be a bit warm here, but there's plenty of music and movies for sale.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If you have an old 3.5" disk drive laying around that you don't care about, plug in the power and let it spin up, then move it around like you might a video camera.
The first thing you will notice is the gyro action. For the modern small video cameras, this would be very noticeable.
Now, bump it against something. You might be lucky and hear a "whack", "clang" or a sound like a circular saw ringing. You just killed that disk drive.
The result of that spinning movements and the heads being pressed against them is not good. Your average IDE and SCSI hard drives are not meant to be moved while running. This is why you should not move your computer while it is powered on -- there is the possibility of skimming the heads against the disk drive platters.
Laptop disk drives are not only smaller for size and weight purposes, but the decreased weight of the platter system reduces problems related the spinning motion and movement of the system. The heads, swingarm, and swingarm actuator are also designed to handle external movement during operation.
The conclusion is that there is not a chance that you will find a standard disk drive in any video camera recorder any time soon. A laptop IDE drive might happen, but I doubt that even they would be able to put up with the punishment that the consumers would put them though.
Actually the reasone MIGHT be closer to the fact that a feature film is 90 - 120 min (not counting the 3 hour movies). I would bet that this limit is to make it harder for people tape movies in the thearter. I know that's why VHS-C tapes were originally kept that short, even though there was room for ALOT more tape in the shell. You don't think the Record/Movie companies started playing dirty with the internet do ya'? They been limiting tecnology for years.
The 2.5" drives in the laptops we get are all 4200 RPMs. I don't think that's fast enough to do video.
It is if the video is already MPEG-4 compressed. 1.5 GB/hour is less than 500 kB/sec. I don't think there's a hard drive sold today that can't handle that.
Good point.
Hey I know, why not just take two peopl in with one camera each and tag team the movie recording?
Heck, the movies are SHOWN with multiple reels, why shouldn't the pirates STEAL them in multiple reels?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I think most CE (Consumer Electronic) companies are very concerned about the "price point." And basically will do anything that will save them $$ and because everything has a mark-up of 1x or 2x or 4x (or more) when it gets to retail, they really try to keep teh price low..
Of course they should learn to make the things modular.. But that is not yet something within their "ken."
http://www.hawknest.com/
If anything you'd get slapped with DMCA suit if you "upgrade" the drive.
You would not be circumventing a copyright protection mechanism and hence DMCA wouldn't be involved, unless they have some sort of protection mechanism built-in to prevent HDD upgrades.
Apples iPods have up to 20GB HDs in them, and should take at least as much a beating as in a camcorder.
Many people have responded to this article discussing the practicality of including or installing a HD larger than 1.5 Gb in a device like this. Most have expressed doubt concerning the reliability as well as the gyroscopic effect.
So, my question is, if I can go jogging with a 20 Gb iPod, why can't I shoot video with a 20 Gb "iCam?"
Gosh, wouldn't it completely suck ass to be stuck with some idiot format that can't decide which one it wants to be, so it applies the same name to all of them, even though that they represent entirely different standards?
Wouldn't it suck even harder if you had to pay licensing fees to put that video that you shot using the camera you bought onto the webspace that you've paid for, and then be lost as to which standard they meant when they said 'MPEG-4?'
This is, of course, just the beginning. Wait until you have to pay them a licensing fee to convert one MPEG-4 format to another MPEG-4 format. Wait and see. Don't forget the most fun part... Licensing terms for MPEG-4 haven't even been set yet. It should be fun when Samsung sends you another bill.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.Org Foundation
IBM makes a 1GB microdrive for about $250, and toshiba makes a 5 GB type 2 PCMCIA hard drive for about $150. I would guess a variant of one of these is on the inside of this camcorder. What I don't understand is why they wouldn't make it removable? It couldn't add more than $20 to what is already likely to be a very expensive toy. I also don't understand how a hard drive is better than a digital tape.
I still recall my grandpa's first video camera, it was like you describe (except it wasn't wireless): the capture device (the camera itself) was tethered to a VCR. When camcorders first came out, where you could put the tape inside the camera, we were all amazed by this new breakthrough, no more lugging your VCR around to take videos. Of course it was much bulkier than my grandpa's video camera, but the convience of having everything in one box outweighed the extra size of the camcorder. I'm sure having seperate camera and recorder now would be less of a hassle, they would be much smaller, but I'm still not sure it would be desirable to have two seperate parts to keep track of.