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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.
Glad to hear they're living up to the illustrious reputation of their predecessor then...
Cheers,
Ian
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.
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.