Monday, December 19, 2005 |
23:03 - Lotta handprints on foreheads
http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio_g/
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JVC is promoting their new Everio as "the world's first hard-disk-based video camera". And I certainly haven't seen one before, so I guess they're justified in saying so.
What I wonder, though, is—what took so long?
With 24 hours or more of high-res digital video storage, and with four years of iPod success proving that hard disks can withstand the heaviest of rigorous activity, what's the downside? Why didn't anybody do this sooner? Why have we been stuck with MiniDV tapes and little pygmy DVD-Rs? What's been the freaking hold-up?
I guess maybe price, but a camera like this has way fewer moving parts, so it's got to be a lot simpler in execution than a tape-based or disc-based camera, with their intricate ejection mechanisms. And there's always the consumable media question which is no longer relevant.
What am I missing? I mean, I'll grant that I didn't go on record with some prescient statement about the inevitability of hard-disk-based camcorders, not least because I never really thought about it too hard; but is that the excuse everyone but JVC is going to cop? I mean, congratulations to JVC, but it doesn't seem like the insight of the century to move camcorders to a proven and superior-in-every-way technology, does it?
Be that as it may, it seems like this could really be a drop-kick for home video production, as suddenly people will be forced to archive and edit their footage instead of just tossing it in a drawer. Maybe that's the answer—maybe it's that the camcorder companies had to wait until people were ready to use their computers as the backup libraries for their old movies instead of a shelf full of tapes, but it seems to me that that could have happened anytime since about 1999. Still, good to see it happening...
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