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Solid-State DV Camcorder
melorama writes "The NAB convention passed 2 weeks ago, and I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the really neat Solid State Video Camcorder that was unveiled by Panasonic. It seems a bit kludgy right now (it records onto a series of PCMCIA cards), but it definitely beats the klunky Avid/Ikegami Camcutter (aka Editcam) from several years back, which records onto a self-contained harddisk. This is certainly a blow to Sony, which is working on a camera acquisition system that uses a blue-laser optical disc (read: moving parts) technology."
Uhm, the whole point is to have a solid state camera.. Hard drives are by no means solid state..
I've figured the reason you don't see a HDD in a DV camcorder now is that they want to sell tapes. A 60GB laptop drive would take less space than the mechanism to drive, read and eject a DV tape, while holding the equivilant of 5 tapes worth of video. With a firewire connection to suck into your computer for editing or writing to your media of choise. Heck, a removable HDD would even work, though in theory you could download from the camcorder directly to a larger desktop drive.
Sony tries with their variations on optical, but I'm convinced that's just to sell media. That's the whole reason they invented the memory stick.
Solid State is just too expensive and/or slow to replace the HDD. If not, laptops would use it now in lieu of the spinning platter.
If the camcorder used a standard laptop drive, in theory it could be upgraded for mor capacity in the future, or even updated with a solid state version if/when they're feasible.
As a professional, I feel that Panasonic did the exact right thing in unveling this at NAB at this early stage, because it shows that an idea like this is more than feasible, given current technology, and I'll be willing to bet my old AU-65 MII deck that once the cost comes down on the memory units, and they implement this technology into a dockable back for pro cameras, professionals will flock to this like flies on shit. I imagine that eventually, the SSD unit will accept more convinenient and swappable "cube" units that each accept an array of memory cards that can be switched out like tapes. I doubt very much that you will be swapping out individual cards that you plug right into slots on the camera back.
I might remind you that there was a time, not so long ago, when audio guys on film shoots wouldn't let you pry their Nagra's from their cold dead hands. Now Deva's are the defacto standard for disk-based location audio recording. Some ideas are so good, that it's worth the pain of quick adaptation and adoption.