[opendtv] News: Camcorders Finally Find Hard Drives

From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 11:07:46 -0500

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/technology/circuits/25stat.html?th=&adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1101398008-uBgg0FNWjvybJx1QjbgNwA
November 25, 2004

STATE OF THE ART

Camcorders Finally Find Hard Drives
By DAVID POGUE

AS technophiles sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, one thing they can
be grateful for is the passing of the magnetic-tape era. The days of
storing computer data, music collections and Hollywood movies on
spools of tape will soon be completely gone.

Sure, tape served its place-holding purpose in technology's march
toward hard drives, CD's and DVD's. But when you consider the
man-years lost to the Stone Age practice of rewinding and
fast-forwarding, tape seems about as modern as Pilgrim hats.

So why do people tolerate tape cassettes in the last holdout,
camcorders? Tapes bring the party to a crashing stop while you try to
find a certain scene, they're easily damaged and their recordings
begin to deteriorate in as little as 15 years.

Some recent camcorders record onto miniature DVD's. But the discs are
expensive and hard to find. Each holds only 30 minutes apiece of
best-quality video. And you can't play them outside of the camcorder
until you've "finalized" them - an agonizing 10- or 20-minute burning
process.

A few other tapeless camcorders can record straight to a memory
card, but only 10 minutes per card. (May all your soccer games,
weddings and school plays be really, really short.)

No, the real future of camcorders suggests itself every time you see
somebody wearing those white iPod earbuds. Earth to electronics
companies: Hard drives! A 60-gigabyte iPod's hard drive can store 15
hours of video, and it's only 1.8 inches in diameter. Now go build
one into a camcorder!

JVC is the first company to see that particular light. Next month, it
will release its new Everio GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200: a pair of
breathtakingly small, tape-free camcorders. (They're identical except
that you hold the MC100 vertically, and the MC200 horizontally. More
on this in a moment.) Both models store gorgeous video - technically
speaking, MPEG2 files in DVD format and quality - directly onto a
tiny hard drive.

Better yet, they record onto removable hard drives. These camcorders
accept standard MicroDrives, which look just like the Compact Flash
memory cards in many digital cameras but actually contain hard drives.

A four-gigabyte MicroDrive comes in the box and holds one hour of
best-quality video. Another four-gigabyte card will set you back
about $200. Of course, you can also buy smaller, less expensive
MicroDrives.

And in a pinch, an Everio can even record onto regular Compact Flash
or SD memory cards (yes, it has two card slots).

Of course, $200 for a hard drive is a tad pricier than the $4 you
would pay for a MiniDV tape. Nobody outside of Michael Dell's tax
bracket will be amassing a drawer full of these things.

JVC has two answers to that. First of all, there's quite a bit of
value in what the hard drive brings you: all the joys of random
access. For example, you can jump from scene to scene without any
rewinding, fast-forwarding or guesswork, either by tapping the
microscopic four-way joystick or with the assistance of the Everio's
"table of contents" thumbnail screen.

You can't splice or reassemble videos right on the camcorder, but
you easily delete unwanted scenes, instantly freeing up disk space
for more video. That's powerful stuff. It means that you can delete
muffed video shots exactly the way you delete bad still shots from a
digital camera.

You feel no pressure when you're waiting for a child, an animal or a
geyser to do its thing; you just roll camera repeatedly and then,
later, delete the "takes" where nothing happened. By the time you're
finished, you have a one-hour hard drive containing only terrific
shots - the rough equivalent of four one-hour videotapes that
desperately cry out to be edited.

Hard-drive recording also gives you the confidence that you'll never
record over something by accident, a feature JVC ought to call
Marriage Saver.

JVC's more thought-provoking answer to the "$200 a pop?!" objection
is that you're not meant to amass a drawer full of them, as you would
ordinary tapes. The company expects that you'll use your little hard
drive over and over again.

The company's logic - which won't appeal to everybody - is that
these days, the first thing many people do with their video is
transfer it. They may connect the camcorder to a VCR or even a
television-top DVD recorder to make copies for themselves or friends.

They may also transfer the video to a computer for editing and
DVD-burning. To that end, each Everio comes with a U.S.B. 2.0 cable
and some basic Windows editing and DVD-burning software.

This part is not JVC's shining moment. For one thing, it seems
incredible that anyone would market an advanced digital camcorder
that's incompatible with the Macintosh, one of the most popular
computers for video editing.

Even if you have Windows, you're expected to copy the video files to
your PC's hard drive manually for editing. Just follow these simple
steps: First, connect the camcorder to the PC. Open My Computer,
double-click on the icon called Removable Disk, open the SD-VIDO
folder (not the DCIM, DCVC or EXMOV folders) and then open the PRG001
folder. Inside, ignore the PRG001.PG1 and MOVODE.MOI files and
instead copy the files with names like MOV00E.MOD and MOV017.MOD to
your PC's hard drive, where you can then open them using the JVC
editing software.

Memo to JVC: This isn't how you make your camcorder popular with
people who never made it to M.I.T.

There are other problems, too. Both units take too long to turn on,
about 8 seconds. Both take pretty good two-megapixel still pictures
as long as they're still lifes; motion shots are blurry. (Sample
photos are at nytimes.com/circuits.) Neither model is good at zooming
and focusing simultaneously. And the manuals for both camcorders warn
you that the MicroDrive may become so hot, the camcorder stops
working. (I never saw this problem, possibly because the 65-minute
rechargeable battery doesn't last long enough to build up that kind
of heat.)

The vertically oriented MC100 (1.6 by 4.1 by 2.8 inches) is smaller
than the MC200 (2.9 by 2.2 by 3.7 inches), but there may be such a
thing as too small. Assuming you have four fingers and one thumb,
it's practically impossible to hold this thing without covering up
the lens or the flash. Worse, all of the camcorder's controls are on
a thin back panel facing you, meaning that you have to operate the
10X zoom lever with your thumb.

The MC200 is larger and more cubelike, but at least you get to hold
it like a traditional camcorder, fingers wrapped around the top. You
can therefore operate the zoom control with your index finger, which
turns out to have much finer control than your thumb. The MC200's
jacks, controls and compartments provide easier access, and this
model is much easier to hold steady, too. (Both Everios have fairly
weak image-stabilizing circuitry.)

Better yet, the MC200's body pivots, so that you can tilt the lens
portion up or down without changing your hand position. That's a
hugely addictive feature - and a necessary one, considering that
neither camcorder has an eyepiece viewfinder (only a small 1.8-inch
L.C.D. screen). These advantages drive the MC200's price up by $100 -
it goes for $1,140 at Amazon.com, for example, compared with $1,045
for the MC100 - but yield a much less fussy design.

In eliminating tape, JVC lets you trade one set of frustrations for
another. You gain excellent video quality, the exhilarating freedom
of random access and a camcorder that's so small, it slips easily
into a coat pocket. But your choice of editing software is much more
limited (and nonexistent on the Macintosh), and you must now get into
the habit of offloading each day's shooting onto some other disk or
tape so that you can reuse the hard drive.

No matter how you judge this new set of compromises, history
suggests that tape in camcorders will eventually die away, just as it
has in other recording devices. JVC's innovative hard-drive
camcorders are two of the earliest and most persuasive nails in its
coffin.

E-mail: Pogue@xxxxxxxxxxx

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[opendtv] News: Camcorders Finally Find Hard Drives

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