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A Tapeless Digital Camcorder For Your Pocket
spullara writes "I've been waiting a long time for a small, tapeless, easy to use digital camcorder. Tapes wear out, they require playback in realtime, and make producing ad hoc movies time consuming. Without these types of recorders you can forget about iVideoPodcasting. I found the Fisher FVD-C1 at an Apple Store last week and it was amazing, but it turns out there is a better one being imported from Japan, the Xacti DMX-C4 thats nearly identical, but better. You can read my review of it here (I have no association with any of these businesses). Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
While these sound 'interesting', I wouldn't want one. What exactly am I supposed to do if I want to go on vacation and not haul along a laptop to download the video onto?
Or I'm somewhere and the drive is full, and I want to keep recording. With a tape-based Camcorder I'd just run to (Costco/Walmart/7-11/Target) and pickup some more MiniDV tapes or whatever.
With this I have to upload the video onto another device...
And I have to worry about making sure to backup the device I download the camcorder's drive to. With tapes, while they are NOT indestructible, and they DO wear out eventually, and (with analog tapes) you can loose quality when you copy them, you don't have to worry about loosing all your recordings because the latest virus wipes your hard drives and you didn't have backups.
_MOST_ people are NOT going to be cluefull enough to make sure to backup their video from their hard drive to DVD or some other medium.
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"Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
Wouldn't it be better if it had 802.11a/b/g so you could actually use it in the near future?
I think that we should actually blame the company, who is putting labels on their product which overstate the technology. Compliance laboratories are worked pretty hard to my knowledge, and it becomes increasingly difficult to weed out products which poorly meet the specifications. I want to support a company which produces high grade equipment, not one who works just hard enough for the selling point.
What an awful review. The extent of interesting product details include storage capacity and transfer speed. How about image quality? Camera features like focus, balance, etc.? Battery life? Video storage capacity (how much time does that 1gb get you)? How about the size of the camera? How heavy is it? Does it seem poorly or well made? etc. etc. This review is very sparse on details, and does little more than summarize some of the features and confirm that the camera works, more or less.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"Nah.. why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)"
Price, weight, durability, longevity, and upgradability?
"Derp de derp."
Amen to that. I read this article with my jaw dropped.
This part makes me wonder why he complains about tape transfer speeds:
There is only one thing that tripped me up that I would like to mention about the camera. While transferring movies from it I found that it was much slower than USB 2.0 should be. As it turns out, although it is spec'd for USB 2.0, it is for "full" speed, not "high" speed. So you should see transfer rates just about 500K/s. It would be much better if it were faster than that as that can mean 2000 seconds for a full 1G SD. Its still way more convenient than tape. I blame the USB committee for allowing devices to be touted as USB 2.0 when, in fact, they are the same speed as USB 1.1.
Okay, so copying a DV tape @ 720p over firewire is slower than this? Not. This sort of defeats his key point in the beginning of the "review".
For $800 you can get an excellent DV camera with near-professional quality and will last for many years. I would suggest avoiding gadgets who's only reason for being on the market is the fact it uses SD ram instead of DV tape. Maybe in 2-5 years there will be real DV cameras with 100GB of storage on them, but now isn't the time.
Personally, I suspect the author only had experience with VHS tape and had never used DV tape as a medium. Otherwise, he wouldn't be saying USB 1.1 speeds are better than "dealing with a tape".
While MPEG4 may be a nice format to store finished video in, it is not a good idea to use it as a storage format:
DV has a resolution of 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL). I'm not even sure if 640x480 is a standard DVD format (720x480/720x576 is); if not, this means recoding to different pixel size for DVD, which means quality loss independent of the encoding itself
Ok, this point might see some disagreement, but I consider it quite unfortunate that the trend goes away from FW to USB2.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A device that displays a USB2.0 and doesn't transmit faster than USB1.1 is a slow USB 2.0 device. Same as for a hard drive that is on an interface 100MB/s and can read its physical medium slower than that. It is still a drive with a 100MB/s interface.
But the point I am trying to make is that a slow USB2 device still allows you to use other USB2 devices (at max speed) on the same hub. Where a USB1.1 device will switch all devices connected to itself to the USB 1.1 mode, hence slowing down the entire chain.
That is a heck of a difference.
So the label "USB2.0" should be read as "will not slow down your usb chain". The speed at which the USB2 norm is implemented in the said device is another question altogether. That is part of the device, and should be accepted like that.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Okay, so copying a DV tape @ 720p over firewire is slower than this? Not. This sort of defeats his key point in the beginning of the "review
Agreed.
The review also talks of the being inconvient to store - good grief - if he's going to transfer them to the computer, why worry?
Secondly, if you're off on holiday and want to shoot a lot of video (and didn't want to lug a PC with you) then you'd still need a few flash cards - For the price of one 512Mb flash ram you could buy a bucket load of tapes. (shrug)
I fail to understand why manufacturers keep making products like this using SD cards. They are smaller, yes, but not by much. Would make much more sense to use CompactFlash so you can at least toss in a 2 or 4GB microdrive card. I can understand SD for a still picture camera, but not for a video camera!
And where are the hard disk cameras? Or should I say, AFFORDABLE hard disk based cameras?