Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Nah.. why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)
That's what i'll keep waiting for.
I'd rather spend $1000 on a Sony DCR-DVD301 (Google'd info) that records directly to Mini-DVD's.
And hard drives work perfectly, forever? At least you can easily swap tapes, they are fairly cheap, and most importantly, they handle shocks pretty well.
Tape-based digital camcorders can do better than realtime playback.
I don't believe it's merely the camcorder that makes producing movies time-consuming!
GOD NO! Imagine your camcorder being slashdotted.
Seriously though, I can't see any real use for connecting a camcorder to the internet directly. Yet the drawbacks are serious. Have we learned nothing from computer security?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Please put some sample movies / pictures online. Specially showing the optical/digital zoom capacity. And maybe some low light movies to see its performance there?
I also have a question:
It got 5.8 times optical zoom and 10 times digital zoom. In video mode the camera only uses 0.3 MP of the available 4 MP (probably a bit more for the image stabilizer?). Anyways, when using digital zoom in video mode, will it simply use the remainder of the MP to do the digital zoom and thus provide a "loss free" digital zoom? Or is it similar to image shooting using digital zoom, where the resulting picture is blurred?
When I saw Fisher my mind went immediately to Fisher-Price. Yes, completely different, but does anyone else remember that Fisher-Price actually made a video camera at one time? It was called the Pixlevision and recorded to audio cassettes! The quality was poor, but just poor enough to look really cool. As I recall, they didn't stay on the market long.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
invent (or hack) an iPod-like-device to act as a portable hard disk for all these flash-RAM-hungry devices.
I've thought of it many times for my still camera. Unless I buy lots of (expensive) flash cards, or lug a laptop with me, I can only shoot as many photos as I have room for...as we all know and have dealt with for many years already.
What I need is a pocket-sized, battery-powered intermediate storage device. When my camera (or voice recorder or tapeless video cam) gets full, I could plug it in to the USB port of my HD tranfer unit (or stick my SD card in the slot, or whatever), hit the "transfer" button; and in as much time as it would take to reload a film camera, have an empty card ready to start shooting again.
Back in civilisation, the HD tranfer unit could plug in like a regular USB drive...just like a flash card reader...so I can do what I normally would do with my photos/video/etc.
As an added bonus - now that it's established technology and lots of people carry them anyway - the HD transfer unit could hold a few GB of music (in .ogg format, of course, to keep the /. zealots happy) and have a decoder chip and headphone socket and whatever else these iPod-like devices have.
For me, being able to download data from my camera would be a digital music player's "killer app".
I would love to get a solid state camcorder,
but I have some issues with the media it uses.
For one, how would the camcorder handle
read/write errors in the media, especialy
where the file system is kept? Would it suffer from cross-linked clusters (very bad, scince
this would foul up the recording big time), or flat out refuse
to operate? With tape, if part of it is bad,
you might get annoying sound bars on the video and other artifacts, but this is usualy more of a
nusance than anything. Also, in extreme cases,
tape can be cut/respliced so if the tape goes
bad, you can still get most of your video off of
it. Can't say the same with flash cards. Also,
through user error or a hardware problem, the whole card could be wiped out (or rendered
unreadable) in an instant, which is generaly not easy to
do with tapes.
I would use something like this for impropmtu
get togethers, or to be able to whip this baby out of my coat pocket, and capture some event,
accident/whatever (much easier than taking my
VHS-C camcorder out of my bag, waiting for the
damn thing to power up and engage the tape...)
but for more important things, I think i'll stick
with take (keeping the Flash cam in my pocket....
just in case.)
My big question ist this: With a 4 Megapixel chip, why do all of these camcorders still output standard PAL/NTSC/VGA quality and do not use the available resolution to its fullest?
Yes there are two HDTV-MiniDV cameras out now (JVC and Sony), but the JVC has a bad contrast range while the Sony has no real 24p recording (or even 25p would fill the bill).
When will somebody finally release a HDTV 1920x1080 camera with 24p below $3000? Or is there a way to fool these tapeless camcorder thingies in recording in a higher resolution?
I'm probably a bit of a Luddite here, but I still like using DV tape, if only for archival purposes. I do a LOT of taping with my Sony DV camera and I do a LOT of editting to create really boring home movies on DVD. What I like about the tape format is that I still a have "raw footage" archive of everything without a lot of management effort. Going to a tapeless camera means that I either have to buy/keep an inventory of SD cards (or whatever) for big $$$ compared to DV tape (I think) OR get into the pain that it is managing disk/optical-based archiving of my raw footage. I just find that, with tapes, I can store them away without worrying too much (yet) about managing them. When the day somes that my DV camera gets replaced by something else, I'll convert the tapes to something else (as I've already done by transferring my old 8mm tapes to DV tape). Flame away....
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.