JVC First With A HD-Based Consumer Camcorder

kamesh writes "David Pogue writes in nytimes.com 'The days of storing computer data, music collections and Hollywood movies on spools of tape will soon be completely gone....JVC is the first company to see that particular light. Next month, it will release its new Everio GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200.' Are tape based camcorders destined to die soon?"

Comments

Why stop at camcorders?

[divide overflow]

I'm hoping that tape-based backup units will disappear and be replaced with something faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

Re:Why stop at camcorders?

[Kenja]

"I'm hoping that tape-based backup units will disappear and be replaced with something faster, cheaper, and more reliable."

Given that tapes are cheaper and more reliable then hard drives what are you looking for?

Re:Why stop at camcorders?

[ScrewMaster]

Is it? That depends. How much is a 500 Gb tape backup system going for nowadays? I have about a thousand gigs of storage on my home network: how much would it cost me to back that up to tape? Sure, the cost per bit of tape is lower than hard disk (although the disparity isn't as great as it used to be) but the barrier to entry is much higher: high-density tape drives aren't cheap. So, from a corporate perspective (where there are substantial IT funds to invest in up-front hardware costs) tape makes a lot of sense: over the life of the drive the savings offered by the use of inexpensive tape are worth it. For small offices and home users a removable hard drive probably makes more sense for backup purposes.

Oh great.

[Kenja]

Now on top of everything else I have to deal with I now get to defragment my camcorder.

Re:Oh great.

[Zorilla]

The idea that there are filesystems out there that don't fragment is a myth. No matter how file storage is done, there is always a chance for data which needs to be loaded in sequence to be scattered over the disk which would make loading very non-optimal as the disk head would have to move all over the place.

Now, fragmentation isn't exactly a big problem for video storage. You're dealing with few, large files being written to disk in a linear fashion.

Re:Oh great.

[ip_fired]

You should take a look at HFS+ Fragmentation.

After six months of use, the average fragmentation was under 1% for 5 different types of users. I know, I know, this is on a Mac. But I'm sure there are other modern file systems that don't fragment, such as ext3 or reiser. I just haven't looked it up.

Re:Oh great.

[evilviper]

The idea that there are filesystems out there that don't fragment is a myth.

Well, if you are getting painfully technical about it, that is, barely, true.

However, while all filesystems may fragment data, most good ones are easily able to keep the fragmentation down under 1%.

My own BSD system is using FFS (UFS). I just checked, and my home partition is under 0.0% fragmentation, even though it's 90% full, and my most fragmented filesystem is nearly-full /var, with 0.1% fragmentation.

With a video camera, the same filesystems could rather easily keep the fragmentation down under 0.001%. Technically fragmented, but nominally so.

I wish I knew what was going through the minds of the mods that marked this insightful.

No Mac Support?

[EccentricAnomaly]

It seems silly beyond belief that these JVC camcorders don't support Macs. Something like this would have wide appeal to the Final Cut Pro crowd...

hmm... someone need to make a mac friendly one of these with
an iPod dock to use iPod mini's as the removable hard drive :)

too small

[WormholeFiend]

The hard drive is too small for me.

If I go on a trip, I want to minimize the amount of stuff I have to lug around... and when I'm on vacation, I don't want to carry a laptop around just so I can dump my footage.

Gimme at least 120gb and then I'll start being interested.

Re:too small

[AKnightCowboy]

If I go on a trip, I want to minimize the amount of stuff I have to lug around... and when I'm on vacation, I don't want to carry a laptop around just so I can dump my footage.

They should put some kind of removable media in it, like a tape drive or something so you can back up the hard drive on long trips without needing a laptop. On second thought, why don't they make camcorders that just record directly to inexpensive tapes and forgo the hard drive altogether? I'd buy one of those.

The article misses the point

[cale]

As is so common in mainstream tech writing, the article completely misses the point. They claim that because the camera can use microdrives (compact flash based hard drives) that it is somehow comparable to the ipod. I don't usually consider 4gb equivalent to 40 gb , 60 gb, or whatever the ipod (and other high cap music players) max capacity is now.

To me, the real advance would be a camcorder that used a 60gb (or larger) hard drive like the ipod and directly recorded mpeg2 or mpeg 4. I don't need the thing to be microscopic, it has to be big enough to hold and have a decent battery life. Obviously it would need firewire of USB2.

Does anyone have a camera like that coming?

Re:The article misses the point

[Chanc_Gorkon]

NO NO NO! MPEG2=COMPRESSED I want raw DV video like my tape based camcorder already uses. That and I personally have no issues with tape being reliable. I guess it all depends on how you treat your tapes. If you constantly finger them or if you just stuff em in your pocket sans case, you WILL have problems. If you always put them back in their case and treat them as if they had your memories on them (Oh wait, they do....), then you should have zero problems.

Re:The article misses the point

[karnal]

" NO NO NO! MPEG2=COMPRESSED"

This is true. However, I would bet that a majority of "consumers" would love to have a hard-drive based camcorder that does a good job at compression without artifacts, because they just play the images back for other family members etc, and don't edit (like I'm assuming you do....)

Now, there's a perfect solution for everyone, and hopefully in the long term, they will remain at similar pricing points. However, if more people buy camcorders that can record 80 hours of Mpeg2 than those that buy tape or uncompressed solutions, then guess what they (the manufacturers) will make more of?

Also, I'm sure with a big enough hard drive, you could do uncompressed -- kind of like the higher end digital cameras. Obviously your time to record would go down, but again, a solution for everyone.

Re:The article misses the point

[farnz]

DV is compressed, too. MPEG-2 I-frame only is the same type of video compression as DV uses, just in a different wrapper.

Re:The article misses the point

[kzinti]

DVD is higher quality than DV

No. DV is higher quality because it's not compressed as much. DV is like MPEG-2 with I-frames only. DVD is MPEG-2 with a series of I-, B-, and P-frames. The B- and P- frames compress better than I-frames only, but lose quality.

DVD can reach higher qualities IF you use high bit rates and spend a LOT of computation time to compute the B- and P-frames. But a camera that has to stream to hard disk in realtime is NOT going to be able to put that kind of horsepower into computing the intermediate frames.

At a given bit rate, and with the kind of electronics in a camera, DV is going to be higher quality and simpler to produce.

DV has a post-processing advantage over DVD in that, because it's I-frames only, it's easier to edit in a program like Premier.

MPEG2 or MPEG4 could be stored at a higher resolution for the same data rate and would look dramatically better.

DV and DVD both use the same resolution, 720x480. As for data rates, you just can't compare DV and DVD. DV operates at a higher data rate than DVD was ever intended to. Contrariwise, DV can't realistically operate at the low data rates of DVD. DVD and DV operate at different ends of a data-rate vs compute-power tradeoff.

At their best data rates - DV's typical 25 megabit per second, vs DVD's max MPEG-2 rate of about 9 megabit, their quality is comparable, and very very good. I find that DV always looks better than MPEG-2 at DVD specs, but DVD can get very close.

Re:The article misses the point

[farnz]

MPEG-2 I-frame only has no defined bitrate to it; it can be 25MBit/s (which leaves the quality identical to DV), 50MBit/s (identical picture quality to DVCPro) or higher. DV is normally run at some multiple of 25MBit/s (so DV is 25MBit/s, DVCPro is DV at 50MBit/s etc).

www.jvc.com connection refused after 9 comments !!

[maharg]

- is this a record ?

If you don't want to register...

[seanismdotcom]

http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftech2. nytimes.com%2F2004%2F11%2F25%2Ftechnology%2Fcircui ts%2F25stat.html&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 &client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:offici a/

Only if the disk is easily replaceable

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with a harddrive based solution is that most people want replaceable media in a film (as well as photo) cameras.

Unloading the drive to free up space just isn't good enough. Not everyone carries a notebook around and I know I'd hate to loose my previous work just because something interesting happend just now and the disk is full.

But with easily replacable standard disks - sure thing!

Re:Cool!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

A D-VHS tape can store about 44 gigabytes. You don't want to know how much money it costs to do that in solid state memory. It looks like the D5 tape standard uses 140GB/hour.

IMO, it is pretty curious that this HD camcorder doesn't use it, as JVC is trying to promote D-VHS, they own the VHS and D-VHS standards.

Acronym Collision!!!

[jhealy]

Oh No!
HD = Hard Drive
HD = High Definition

Confusion in future Slashdot articles = imminent

...and another thing

[EccentricAnomaly]

I gotta keep complaining about how much JVC just doesn't get it. I've been waiting forever for a HD camcorder, but this thing is a dog. Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops. Keep it simple and elegant and eliminate all of the little thumb buttons and crazy menus within menus within menus that makes most digital camcorders and cameras such a drag to use.

And no viewfinder! What are you going to do on a sunny day when the LCD is all washed out... shoot in a random direction?

For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.

Re:...and another thing

[goon america]

For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.

Ha, ha! If this were true, you'd expect more games to be actually fun to play, or big-budget movies to be worth watching.

The problem with the consumer electronics industry, as in these other industries, is that they are trying to get you to BUY the damn thing. They don't care about what you do after that point, because most of the time the consumer isn't going to really know at the moment of deciding to buy, either.

So, instead they try to pump up or rachet down various specs in an attempt to try to fool the customer into thinking that these will translate into a better usage experience. Get some quick short-run profits and try not to worry about what's going to happen to the brand in the long term. Happy sailing!

Re:...and another thing

[sahonen]

$15,000 cameras have B&W viewfinders. Makes it easier to focus, actually.

No,not so soon

[muditgarg]

"Are Tape-based camcorders going to die out soon"

I dont think so.
Hard drive based have a disadvantage as there is no way to increase the offered storage space( Though 300 mins of video in this particular product seems pretty good , but still if going for a vacation I may rather carry some extra tapes( which are quite cheap) than keep transferring the video to a computer.
Also hard disc based camcorders are known to be more fragile than tape based( as well as cd-rom and flash memory based)

first?

[oneishy]

How is JVC first when i spotted my eye on this 4MP Sanyo several months ago! (it was RELEASED on september 10th!)

I'm always suspicious of companies that claim 'first' status. Are there any other companies which beat JVC out the door on this?

Re:first?

[cot]

"21 minutes of video recording with 512MB SD memory card at 640x480 "

SD would be a funny acronym to use for a hard drive, particularly since secure digital memory cards already use it.

Re:first?

[tattoi.nobori]

How is JVC first when i spotted my eye on this 4MP Sanyo several months ago!

Gee, that must have hurt! Is it still there?

Re:first?

[oneishy]

The JVC can also use SD or CF (it has slots for both) in place of a Hard Drive, so they really are in the same group when it comes to non-tape storage. The JVC may also offer HD as storage medium, but does that really matter when you are claiming to be the first non-tape?

Re:it show's it has a 4 GB drive?

[malfunct]

A tape is like $4, find me 4GB hd's for that price and I'll carry a few.

That said, anyone know the lifetime on mini-dv tapes? Is it better than on optical media (dvd-r specifically). I'm trying to decide how best to archive video of my child. DVD is great for watching but I fear that some day I'll pop it in the machine and it will be dead.

Holly Granola

[roman_mir]

JVC.COM is slashdotted!

You know, IPod became very successful with harddrives, how is this different? Except that the tape was cheap storage media (relatively cheap) so this may not become as ubiquitous as HDs in MP3 players, I mean people still use VHS tapes (I haven't used them in about 2 years though.)

I think tape is still good for backup storage and it is cheap, and it is easy to use and reuse, so it is not going away yet.

Tapes gone?

[October_30th]

The days of storing computer data, music collections and Hollywood movies on spools of tape will soon be completely gone

Uh. I hope not.

Tapes are the most reliable and versatile medium for massive data storage and even the tapes can't keep up with the demand.

On my home computer, I've got 500+ MB worth of results from simulations that I would like to back up but there's just no affordable way to do that.

And no, having the data on RAID-arrays or copying it onto spare hard drives is not "backing the data up".

Re:Tapes gone?

[cot]

WTF are you talking about? Copying the data onto spare hard drives IS backing it up. Particularly if the backup hard drive setup is a RAID.

HD-based portable video-corders....

[commo1]

DO NOT let George Lucas NEAR the things.

I don't like the idea, but,

[pair-a-noyd]

I have video tapes that are 10-15 years old and many have a white mildew on them, most are otherwise bad now, they will ruin the heads of any VCR you put them in. Gone forever.

However, I have old full height hard drives from the 5160 days that I can fire up right now and pull data from 20 years later.

CD and DVD has shown's it's miserable failings, I've lost LOTS of CD's that were only a few years old.

It takes a damn long time for the platters in a hermetically sealed HDD to go bad when it's sitting unused in storage.

If they can get them smaller, cheaper and more reliable, I'm on board with this. I just hate to let go of the old ways. I guess some of us suffer the Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to what we've always used and have all our eggs in..

Easy fix for the tapes

[Gordonjcp]

I have video tapes that are 10-15 years old and many have a white mildew on them, most are otherwise bad now, they will ruin the heads of any VCR you put them in. Gone forever.

Get an old video recorder, the older the better. You're looking for a seperate motor for each drive, top loader if possible, with a metal deck. Remove the top cover.

Glue two cotton makeup removing pads (the kind *without* moisturiser, just dry cotton pads) or something similar to two pieces of wood. Arrange them so they squeeze the tape gently.

Wind the tape backwards and forwards a few times, and the gunk will get wiped off the tape. If they are really bad, change the pads between each pass. Periodically hoover the mouldy gunk out of the machine.

If there is something really stubborn on the tape, soak two pads in alcohol, arrange a big long drying loop (you may need to remove the head block) with a fan to blow dry it, then two "dry" pads for a final wipe.

This works, and works well.

thanks but no thanks

[isecore]

I haven't RTFA yet (JVC is politely yet firmly denying any connection attempts) but this really seems like a big woofing dog IMHO.

I do a lot of videostuff (documentaries, inane little comedies, etc etc) on a semi-professional basis and this really has no appeal to me.

First off, tapes are very robust. They can take a lot of damage and still be usable. Harddrives are not very robust (at least not in the same way as tape). Also, a camera without replacable storage is in my opinion worthless, especially when it's a fragile harddrive. Tapes are also very cheap (I buy my DV-tapes for about US$2 a piece)

Tape-based DV-cameras are very flexible, and this nonsense about JVC putting editing functions on this camera seems completely pointless to me. Editing should be done on an editing-platform (Mac/Final Cut, or whatever floats your boat). Editing capabilites on a camera is a "feature" that no one will use, since it's likely to be crap.

I don't want a camera that I have to be worried about breaking the storage in. I most assuredly need a camera with replacable storage, since when I'm off shooting a documentary I have no idea as to how much space/tape it will use. Having to limit myself to whatever JVC feels is the norm is completely pointless.

This whole thing seems to me to be a case of "can we make a harddrive-based camcorder? YEAH! is it of any use? NO, but lets do it anyway because there's always morons who want some new toy!"

FYI, DV=compressed

[Andy Dodd]

Yes, DV is also a compressed format, although it uses FAR less compression than MPEG does.

Most importantly is that it does not do difference frame encoding, each frame is compressed completely independently of all others. DV is basically a Motion JPEG variant. Not the most efficient compression algorithm, but good if you need to edit your video since you can split the video at any frame. (As opposed to MPEG, which requires you to recompress the video if you want to split anywhere other than a keyframe.)

an hour?

[geekoid]

I can only put an hour of recording on it? no thanks.

Plus I can gte(just did, in fact) a decent camcorder for 199.99. When you can get these for 199, then analog might be in trouble.

Why not both??

[Reziac]

Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.

That would let you make cheap backups on the road or offload your video whenever you ran out of HD space (just pick up a few $4 minitapes anywhere), or copy video from an existing tape, etc.

Any of the knowledgeable folk in the DV/MPEG discussion above have technical objections or feasibility comments?