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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?"
The Xacti DMX-C4 is an amazing camcorder
As you might have read, my wife and I are having our first baby. So, of course, we needed a video camera.
One of the biggest complaints I have with mini-DV cameras is that you copy the data off them at the same speed you put the data on them. This is a nightmare. Additionally, tapes are terribly inconvenient to search, store, carry, etc. I was down at the Apple Store in Palo Alto on Tuesday of last week and saw a new camcorder there, the Fisher FVD-C1. It was amazingly small but easy to hold, used solid state storage, and had pretty good specs. At the store it was $800, so I wandered over to one of the Macs they have setup there connected to the internet and searched to see what the real going rate was. As it turns out, it cost about the same from Amazon. Later I did some more research and found a little company in California that imports Japanese only products into the US that had another version of the camera direct from Sanyo (Fisher OEMs their product). In addition to being the same size it also had 4MP instead of 3MP, a 1.8in LCD instead of 1.5in, and some improved software. Even better, it didn't come bundled with only a 512M card, instead it was $600 and you could buy a high-speed 1G SD card from them for an extra $120 (you can get them a little cheaper elsewhere, but i wanted it all to come at the same time).
Everything about the camera screamed buy me, so I did. I chose their cheapest shipping option (they are definitely making a bit of profit on their prices) and ordered it and a 1G card on Tuesday night. It arrived on Thursday morning, way sooner than I expected. All the manuals are in Japanese, fortunately I don't read those. Amusingly, it also talked in Japanese until I figured out you could change it to English mode by navigating the helpful pictograms.
Hooking it up to my Mac was trivial, it comes with a USB dock / recharging station that you just connect to your computer. It has a button on it to switch it between being connected and charging. I'm not sure if it is recharging when it is connected or not. Because it is also a still camera, when you plug it in and connect it, iPhoto launches and allows you to import any photos. Immediately I realized that I would need an efficient way to handle all the clips that I would be generating and I am a little bummed that there is nothing like iClips that comes with the Mac. I have some ideas about how that would work, maybe I should put something together. Instead of making a full fledged application, I instead did some applescript to get it setup with a Folder Action. So now when I plug it in, it immediately finds all the movies, renames them from their generic names to timestamp names, copies them to my Movies directory, and then if there are no pictures it ejects the camera and quits iPhoto all in one smooth motion. In the end I want to build something that lets me drop any of the movies onto a drop site and immediately reencode them for the web and post them to my website for consumption by the ever vigilant grandparents of our daughter to be. Speaking of photos, it does a pretty good job at those as well. Not as good as my Elph, but good enough.
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.
The movie/picture demo on their Yahoo store is pretty accurate and reflects the quality of the MPEG4/AAC recording that I have gotten while using the camera.
You can't handle the truth.
Wish i had the money to drop on a real tapeless cam. Bought one of these last week along with a 512MB SD card for parties. Mixed reviews, but the price is right for a poor college student.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Nah.. why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)
That's what i'll keep waiting for.
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.
.sig
"Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
Yes, because my local electric car recharging station now has a WiMax hotspot...
Coral Cache link
Mirror Dot link
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I'd rather spend $1000 on a Sony DCR-DVD301 (Google'd info) that records directly to Mini-DVD's.
"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?
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/
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.
Sony is rolling out their Professional Disc line of professional video equipment. The central part of their XDCAM tapeless system is a 'Blu-ray' disc, storing approximately 24 Gigabytes of data. Professional cameras and VTRs supporting XDCAM can use multiple formats, including DVCAM [DV25] and MPEG-IMX.
Sony already had support for XDCam from AVID at the National Association of Broadcasters converntion in Las Vegas in April, one of the big names in Non-Linear (computer-based) video editing systems (NLEs).
Sony plans to make computer drives able to read and write XDCAM discs, allowing Non-Linear Editing without re-capturing.
Links:
XDCam FAQs (pdf)
MPEG-IMX White Paper [v2] (pdf)
Video Production Support
I use a MiniDV camera and record directly to a 30GB firewire harddisk. No need to use tapes, no need to capture. Sure, it costs a lot more, but it's a pro solution able to store two hours and half of video (DV CODEC).
Mustek DV-4000, see it at http://www.mustek.com/html/prod_camra/dv4000/dv400 0.html
I had one of those, it was really nice, i'd like better light sensitivity, but you can't get everything.
It had quite good image quality, one socket for SD card, battery, in-build recharger etc. Night mode and other juicy features.
It costed around 380-420euros here when i got one, altho i didn't pay that much.
It was really great for the price, and with 512mb sd card you can shoot over 2hours of video. encodes also MPEG4/AAC.
Only thing is: those vids didn't play in BSPlayer, on WMP they played nicely altho, after installing the WMV codecs which came on the CD. Didn't try other players.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
The USB folk's naming and packaging recommendations actually discourage the use of "USB 2.0" since it is confusing as heck ... but I agree with the parent that they kinda created this monster by saying that there is a "Lo-speed" and "Full-speed" USB 2.0 that are the same speed as USB1.x ... so most consumers (myself included) see USB 2.0 and unless we look carefully for "Hi-Speed", then things aren't any faster than 1.x ... which is an issue for still photography and a BIG issue for video.
BTW, have we ever seen a first post that has been so informative - mod the parent to +10 - nice work roman mir
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Anyone using such a horrible made-up word should be shot. If you want long compound words, German is --> that way.
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.
Nice one, dipshit.
This guy is impatient. He's got a whole 13 years to edit together the baby videos to make the perfect embarrass-my-teenage-kid movie.
Panasonic SV-AV100 does record MPEG2 on SD card.
File size is still a problem though (even a bigger one than with MPEG4) but quality isn't as bad as MPEG4, and MPEG2 is much better than MPEG4 in term of editing and handling (you can actually USE what you record).
But these are still expensive products, I think Id'still go the DV way.
However, if I had the cash, I would have of these with me... the "on the go video" factor is really nice.
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?
Er... here in Europe we call that "my phone".
Seriously, though... you guys don't have digital flash-memory video cameras on your cellphones? WTF? Digital still cameras have been standard on cellphones for the last two years, video and flash memory last year. I don't want to start a "diss the yanks" thread, I realise there are plenty of things y'all do better, but... you chaps need to have some serious words with your cellular providers, you're not getting good handset upgrades.
My phone has digital video camera and an MMC card offering up to 1GB of storage. The phone came free with 100 minutes of calls on a monthly £25 (US$50) contract, albeit only with a 32mb MMC card, then I purchased a larger MMC seperately for thirty quid. My missus got one too, free with contract again, here's footage she shot of squirrels in the churchyard.
I didn't even need to change contracts. I just rang them up and said I'd quit my contract after a year unless they upgraded my handset to a video model. It was delivered next day.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
No, it would not. Why would you want to make anyone sit through your hours of uneditted footage?
If only owners of video cameras (and those uploading _all_ their digital photos to an online gallery) learned to edit what they capture before submitting it to their friends the world would be a lot less violent place...
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?
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.
With a microdrive... looks pretty cool and ranges from 1 hour to 4 hours, depending on your quality setting.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby