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?"

Comments

before /.ers wake up

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:before /.ers wake up

[mike3411]

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.

Re:before /.ers wake up

[Awptimus Prime]

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".

1Gb of storage on SD?

[big ben bullet]

Nah.. why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)

That's what i'll keep waiting for.

wimax?

[MrSpiff]

"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?

Samples

[DaneelGiskard]

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?

Re:Samples

[ohdawg]

Here's a direct link to a sample from the Sanyo Xacti DMX-C4 page mentioned in the article:

4.35mb sample

Thats assuming it still works by the time you see my reply (and it hasnt been slashdotted)

Fisher Price

[Concerned Onlooker]

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.

Sounds like a neat camcorder, But...

[melekcrescent]

"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."

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.

The Pro version -- Professional Disc -- XDCam

[tonsofpcs]

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)

There is one samekind of cam, but cheaper

[Skal Tura]

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.

USB Naming/Packaging issues

[xmas2003]

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 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

ivideopodcasting?

[DrHyde]

Anyone using such a horrible made-up word should be shot. If you want long compound words, German is --> that way.

Not something I would buy ...

[maxwell demon]

Following the link in the review and another one to the actual product description, I've found out the following facts (OK, some have also been somewhat in the review):

• storage format is MPEG4.
  
  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:
  
  • If you want to cut, you don't want to have any format which contains non-keyframes
  • If you don't want to cut, but burn on DVD, you have to recode, which means some quality loss.
• Image format 640x480
  
  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
• No Firewire
  
  Ok, this point might see some disagreement, but I consider it quite unfortunate that the trend goes away from FW to USB2.

Re:No Thanks...

[TheMysteriousFuture]

Already exists :)
see steves-digicams
Scroll down to "Image Storage Devices" for reviews of a bunch of them.

See also the Belkin iPod Media Reader for a device that'll let you transfer all the major flash media formats to your iPod.