Tech.viewFlipping the video

A tiny camcorder shakes up the market

IT HAS been a gloomy autumn for retailers selling television sets, audio gear and other consumer electronics. Demand for such goods, according to Retrevo, a search and shopping site, has headed steadily south since last summer. It spiked in late November (the traditional start of the holiday shopping season) as bargain-hunters knocked down doors to snap up one-time offers, then promptly fizzled out again.

Surprisingly, one of the few product categories to defy the downward trend has been the video camera. Eclipsed by the past decade's helter-skelter development in digital photography, digital video has only just begun to re-emerge into the spotlight.

Two disruptive developments seem to be driving camcorder sales. One is the “Flip” pocket camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies, which burst onto the scene 18 months ago, prompting a wave of copycat models from other manufacturers. By stripping out all but the essentials, the Flip created a new type of camcorder that has revitalised the market.

Like point-and-shoot digital cameras, the new mini-camcorders simply work. Being no bigger than an iPod means they can be carried everywhere, making them always ready to capture “special moments” that would be lost while digging out a bigger camcorder and firing it up.

Weighing a few ounces and running off a couple of AA batteries, they capture video with DVD quality (640-by-480 resolution) at 30 frames per second, and store it on tiny flash-memory cards. A USB jack slides out of the camera to transfer the video to a personal computer for easy editing and playback.

Thanks to their MPEG-4 video compression, Flip-like devices produce movies virtually as good as bigger camcorders costing hundreds of dollars more but using the less efficient MPEG-2 algorithm. A year ago, your correspondent paid $79 for an RCA Small Wonder that offered more features and an even lower price than the original Flip.

The star of the current crop is the Kodak Zi6. With its 2.4-inch screen and ability to record high-definition (720p) video, the Zi6 has a street price of around $140.

The other disruptive development that's driving camcorder sales is the widespread adoption of high-definition television (HDTV), which is now in 40m (one in three) American homes.

Viewers with a 50-inch HDTV set who've grown accustomed to watching high-definition broadcasting, Blu-ray discs or even “up-sampled” DVDs that emulate the latter's resolution, find the video quality of ordinary camcorders disappointing.

Until recently, tape-based camcorders were the smart choice. Camcorders using the MiniDV tape format were among the cheapest on the market. Their tiny cassette tapes lasted for up to 90 minutes, cost around $3 apiece and could be erased and reused.

As a bonus, they offered the best video quality around. The algorithm involved in DV compression ran three times faster than the MPEG-2 used for compressing video onto MiniDVDs or hard-drives. All things being equal, the faster the rate of compression, the better the video quality.

But apart from being easier to handle and edit, MiniDVD and hard-drive camcorders have since caught up on picture quality. A couple of years ago, Sony and Panasonic introduced a high-definition form of compression derived from their Blu-ray disc format. This high-definition algorithm (called AVCHD) can record in two of the three picture qualities used by HDTV—the 720p and 1080i formats, though not the top-ranking 1080p.

By contrast, the high-definition form of the MiniDV format (called HDV) also offered 1080i resolution, but only in the old-fashioned 3-by-4 picture shape. The captured video had to be digitally “stretched” to fit the 9-by-16 proportions of a modern HDTV set.

Such drawbacks were expected to put the final nail in MiniDV's coffin. But thanks to the internet, tape-based camcorders live on. Like the little Flip-style pocket camcorders, their standard-definition resolution is more than adequate for MySpace, YouTube and other streaming-video sites. Currently, high-definition video is mostly wasted on the internet.

This will change. And anyone about to buy a video camera should future-proof themselves by opting for a high-definition version, even though they currently cost more. The question, then, is which mainstream recording media—DVD or hard-drive—to choose?

That depends on what you want to do. If you just want to make home movies for family and friends, then MiniDVD camcorders are the obvious answer. The DVDs are easy to record on, watch and share.

The downside is that recording times can be as short as 15 minutes. Also, some older DVD players can't handle MiniDVDs.

If, however, you want to make more professional videos for product demonstrations or training exercises, then a camcorder with a hard-drive is a better bet. Most can store 60 gigabytes or more—about 14 hours of high-quality video. Meanwhile, transferring the captured video to a computer for editing, using a USB cable or memory card, becomes a snap.

But then you're stuck with the problem of distribution. The obvious answer is to burn it onto a Blu-ray disc. One problem: very few people have Blu-ray recorders.

So, for the time being, the best course is to shoot, edit and save the video (on a hard-drive) in high-definition. Next, make a second copy that's “down-sampled” to standard definition, so it can be burned onto a DVD. Finally, play the edited disc in an up-sampling DVD player. The result will be something close to the original high-definition movie—but cheap and easy enough to distribute.

In a year or two, when every laptop comes with a Blu-ray burner, you'll be able to make a fresh copy of the original movie in its full high-definition glory.

But don't expect the copies to last indefinitely. Blu-ray discs are likely to deteriorate even faster than the ten years or so of DVDs. So, having master copies on a hard-drive will be handy for the grandchildren—provided, of course, they will still be able to read such antiquated devices.

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