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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)?"
I'm sure someone will figure a way to replace the internal drive with a larger one, as they did the first TiVo's.
Is the IBM MicroDrive still around?
yes they are.
they have 2 problems....
1 - horribly expensive.. I can buy a CF card of the same size for less than 1/2 the price of a microdrive.
2 - horribly delicate.. pick up the microdrive and lightly pinch it... Oops.. it's dead now.
we used to use microdrives here for some data recording... we went through 10 of them in 3 months.. while the CF cards dont fail.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... the camera were a small wireless capture device and the recording device could be left on your belt or in a bag with it's own monster batteries? Hell it could be your laptop.
That way the device in your hand has no moving parts, cost less and it would be easy to upgrade the storage separately.
Jukebox Multimedia 20 Handheld Entertainment Center USB 1.1 20GB Hard Disk+MP3+MPEG 4
1.3 Megapixel Camera, MP4 Video Camcorder
Specs
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
I would like to see Apple team up with a camcorder manufacturer (e.g. Sony) and build a camcorder into the iPod. Seems like the next natural step to me.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
I believe you maybe mistaken. Just checking on Amazon.com the cheapest 1GB Microdrive is $299.88. While the cheapest 1GB compact flash card is $564.99. Sure you'll be able to get them cheaper if you shop around but for the moment at least the microdrive is significantly cheaper than Compact Flash.
In my personal experience microdrives are tough enough. I've dropped my microdrive twice and it has survived perfectly well. But you do of course have to take care of them just like any electronic equipment. But they are certianly not as delicate as you suggest.
Glad to hear they're living up to the illustrious reputation of their predecessor then...
Cheers,
Ian
The iPod is, by all practical means, only a HD.
The microcontroller and the display don't use much space or power. The only thing which adds to size and weight is the accumulator.
Cameras sport things like lenses, sensors, and a real display, which need more space, and they need a lot more processing power (especially
, when encoding in MPEG4), which in turn require more space for the energy storage.
> What's the use of a tiny camcorder if you can't use it?
Admittly, the use is quite limited. When you want a tiny, fast copyable and computer-editable video, go for it. When you want to record more than 1h of video without pit stop at a PC, buy yourself some other device.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
You think HDDs are going to be more volatile than tapes? Are you referring to durability, ie able to sustain impacts, or reliability, ie not going to go bad in 3 years? Because for the latter, I'd rather have a HDD than tape. I don't have any stats to back that up though...
Synergy is your friend
Well, I've left tapes on the back of my car, only to come back to the scene to retrieve them and found them smashed up on the street. After getting the rolls put into new cases, the digital video was intact. I guess that gave me enough faith to stick with Digital8.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Samsung is not a hacker-friendly corporation like TiVo. If anything you'd get slapped with DMCA suit if you "upgrade" the drive.
Also, I don't think this is a consumer-grade HDD. There is no mention of the type in the official press release, and arising out of the fact that none of the current HDD mfg's make anything near 1.5gb capacity drives, I'm willing to guess: this is a proprietary model.
A few objections:
1. It transfers footage at a faster rate in part because it captures less data. Whatever use I'm going to make of my images (moving or still) I like to start off with as much information as possible and discard as appropriate. That's why DV wins over MPEG4 for capture.
2. I spent a long time trying to work out an economical way of storing my DV stuff in high quality formats. I could get a DVD burner, but that's kind off expensive. CD work work, but really fiddly to store a lot of data, and CDs can be prone to decay. Maybe firewire hard drives. but that's not cheap either. Then stupid me realised I could just dump the stuff back on to the tape it came from, suitably edited! $6 for an hour of high quality video, which beats anything the Samsung can offer.
3. If I fill up my tape in mid event I can swap it for a new one within a minute. Harder to do with a HD.
So, interesting tech, but not yet useful I think.
Cheers, Paul
I bought mine off of Best Buys web site for $400 including the camera module, media modules. They shipped free to my house. Lovely device and easy to use. Picture quality isn't so good in dim lighting but 1.3M pixel still pics outside are great. MPEG4 Video playback on my TV is really good, recorded video from camer module is OK (frame rate is not as fast as I'd like), MP3's sound awesome, etc. Now I'm just waiting for the video feed MPEG hardware recorder module to come out.
It's almost there. What I'd buy,if they'd build it, is a full featured DV camcorder, but with the tape mechanism replaced by a HDD. Standard DV tapes hold 11GB. A readily available 60GB drive would hold 5+ hours of high quality video with CD quality audio. The current HDD's would take up less space than a DV tape and assorted mechanisms.
With firewire you could then extract the video, either temporarily archiving on a larger disk in your PC, or dump to DVD-R's as either MPEG2, or as raw files for editing later.
For the people who complained that there's no need for longer recoding capacity than you batteries last: you're wrong. With non-removable storage you'd want to have the capacity to last until you get to a place where you could dump the contents. A weekend trip might involve several battery changes / recharges before returning to a place where you could empty the camera.
There might be a small "consipiracy" against this sort of camcorder as it would not consume tapes, but then many of the camcorder manufacturers aren't selling blank tapes. Sony likes making things that use odd or new media to get the media sales later, but not all manufacturers are in that position.
One last comment, Hitachi brought out it's MPEG-Cam years ago. It recorded MPEG-1 onto a PCMCIA hard drive that was smaller than many of the CF cards we use today. It was a little more bulky than a point and shoot still camera, but smaller than a compact camcorder. Of course it didn't have the stuff that modern camcorders have today like large zoom, image stabilization or firewire output.
But haven't you noticed that there is also a conflicting conspiracy to lower the average length of a movie to less than an hour and a half?
Looking at a list of recent releases I see very few that are in the triple digits of minutes (One weekend I was shocked that no movie was more than 99 minutes long).
Yet what's the price for that movie? Oh yeah, it's still the same $8/$9/$10 you pay for a three hour moviethon like Lord of the Rings.
Check it out yourself if you don't believe me. I think studios are realizing any footage beyond an hour and a half would be best used as filler to boost sales of their DVDs. I don't doubt that within a couple years it will be the very rare exception for a movie to be longer than an hour and a half, and some will be barely over an hour.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
...in fact, in few months they will start selling upgrades to 2Gb, 6Gb, 10Gb, 20Gb.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Encrypting the signal after you do device handshaking/negotiation is easy.
How do you handle device handshaking/negotiation? You have 2 of these wireless harddrives for recording (and your neighbor has 1 too...). How does the camera decide which receiver to send to? I'll accept that it is easy to do excryption after that... (that's fairly well understood for most internet crypto stuff). But how does this stuff decide who the proper recipient is? How do you switch from one receiving harddrive to another when the first fills up? Without accidentally sending it to your neighbor's unit?
This has to be easy enough a normal consumer to handle. No keying in a 32-digit serial number for the receiver into the transmitter. As close to automatic as possible. Press a button on both simultaneously to synch them, maybe.
Remember, this is no longer a geek toy. This is consumer electronics... it needs to "just work". Easy. Simple. And without having your bedroom home movies show up on your neighbor's tv.
You're hitting the problem with wireless security... secure *or* convenient... both together... that's very difficult.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Uncompressed DV-format video takes up 3.5 mb/sec. That's about 12.6 gigs/hour. The DVD-Rs used in camcorders aren't normally full-size -- in fact, they're only 2.8 gigabytes. So now we're looking at 4:1 compression, which is about what one gets when compressing to MPEG. So 1/4 the space at 1/4 the size gives us about the same as we started: one hour.
One might ask why DVD-R palmcorders don't use full-size DVDs. There are two reasons for that. The first is spin stability. Torque being equal to the cross-product of force and distance from axis of rotation, a larger disc radius means much greater stability problems. Back in the days before 4 MB CD-R buffers, you might've noticed that your CD-R drive was much less shock-resistant when burning the last half of the disc rather than the first half (or the other way around, I don't quite remember how it was). CD-Rs burn from the inside-out (or vice versa, like I said, I just can't remember right now). When the CD-R gets to burning the outer portion of the disc, its much less fault-tolerant. Disable the cache of your CD-R or hook up an old one to test it out if you don't believe me.
There's also just the issue of disc size. People like their consumer electronics to be small. Small consumer electronics means lighter weight, less baggage, easier to put in a carry-on for that three-hour New York to Orlando flight. It also means that there's less to lug around Disneyworld, especially when you've got to take a diaper bag for Junior. Lot's of people owned camcorders ten years ago, but they were big and didn't take them out. Now they're small, so people take them everywhere, which means that more people see them everywhere, more people buy them, etc. So I guess maybe there's a conspiracy to make small consumer electronics, but I'm not complaining.
At this point you might say "Ah-Ha! But miniDV also has the 1-hour limit. So did older Hi-8 and mini-SHVS tapes. What gives there, huh?" The answer is pretty simple. Those standards all spring from larger ones. miniDV springs from full-sized DV (with up to 180 minute capacity). Hi-8, though not identical, is derived from VHS. The origin of mini-SVHS and mini-VHS should be obvious. With the possible exception of Hi-8, the mini-formats exist so that they are interoperable with the larger standard. Sure, maybe it'd be possible to re-design miniDV so that it would have higher capacity. But that would make it incompatable with full-DV -- a compatability that not only drives down costs (one standard) but also makes it appeal to the professional and semi-professional market (you can't fault electronics companies for being good businesspeople). There's some simple math here. MiniDV is about half the size of full-DV (in terms of tape length). If max DV = 180 minutes, than max miniDV should equal 90 minutes (which is the case). Half the tape, half the length. Same goes for mini-VHS -- a standard that was invented to keep portability high and still allow tapes to be played in regular VCRs (wasn't that cool -- and talk about something that might encourage piracy!).
The miniaturization of the standards occurred because electronics companies know that consumers will put portability ahead of media length. Sometimes it's a pain -- weddings, bar mitzvahs, Junior's debut as Hamlet -- often last longer than an hour. But for most consumers, the portability and size are well worth it (check out bhphotovideo.com to see how big full-size DV/SVHS camcorders are).
Corporate conspiracy hogwash. The limits in each case derive from standards, and nobody was thinking of any sort of conspiracy when developing the original standard. To think that the media companies think that far ahead is giving them way, way too much credit. It's a little akin to saying that backup manufacturers are keeping their capacity low relative to hard-drive/server capacity so that people have to buy multiple backup systems. That's pretty crazy. Media are limited. Get used to it.
As for the size of the hard-drive in question, I think I can shed some light on that. As a consultant who works largely with design/graphics/art firms, I work with digital video systems a lot. Hard drive fault tolerance is a huge factor -- when you're streaming video, a slight failure translates into choppy video, dropped frames, or worse (like a loss of timecode that renders subsequent footage near-useless). A variety of professional companies make expensive portable FireWire drives that you can connect to a camcorder to capture footage directly to disk instead of to tape. These systems have huge (often 25+ meg) cache. Some of my clients have invested in these systems and been extremely disappointed. Anything more than a smooth walk causes dropped frames or corrupted files. Regular hard drives, even laptop drives, might be able to stand up to the stress for occasional disk access (such as with an iPod). But for continuous write, much higher standards are necessary. Keeping the cost down was probably a big impetus to only having a 1.5 gig drive -- again, most consumers really don't need more than an hour of video.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.