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

Oh great.

[Kenja]

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

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 :)

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?

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

[maharg]

- is this a record ?

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: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.

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".

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.