New Camcorders Give Consumers More Choices

Tammie White, left, tries her hand at using their DVD mini-camcorder as her husband Woody White, right, watches as they film their children Hayden and Haley on the swing, Thursday, April 13, 2006, in the backyard of their home in Wilmington, N.C. The Whites bought a DVD camcorder last year, helping to make it the fastest growing format in camcorder history. (AP Photo/Karen Tam) (Karen Tam - AP)

DVD camcorders, which offer the convenience of straight-recording to a DVD _ without the need for any special cables for playback on a TV, are priced at $450 or more. Blank mini-DVD discs cost $15 for a 10-pack and hold 20 to 30 minutes of video, depending on the recording mode.

You'll pay $600 to $1,000 for hard-drive models that offer easy, instant access to any part of the video right on the camcorders themselves, without rewinding _ similar to how digital still cameras offer quick photo reviewing capabilities.

Hard-drive camcorders also offer the most capacity, with 30-gigabyte models that can store seven hours of video at the highest-quality settings, and twice that in standard mode.

Camcorders that use flash memory have some of the same benefits as hard-drive models and are typically the most pocketable. Prices start around $200, but storage capacity is limited. Models commonly offer 512 megabytes of built-in flash memory, which holds about 30 minutes of video, or a slot for removable SD cards, of which the biggest available is 2 gigabytes and costs about $80 if purchased separately.

The tapeless models typically require users to transfer video footage to a computer to free up recording space.

The transfer is fast and easy, similar to the click-and-drag of computer files and vastly different from the time-consuming process needed for MiniDV camcorders, in which the video must be played back in real-time while being transferred to the PC. Only after that can any editing begin.

Analysts expect MiniDV's long dominance to decline over the next few years as major brands like Sony, Canon, Panasonic and JVC focus on newer technologies.

Sony, the market leader, accounted for more than 40 percent of the 12.5 million camcorders shipped worldwide last year, according to market researcher IDC. It now has five DVD models, up from three last year. Sony also plans to invest in more hard drive models and high-definition video camcorders in coming years to complement the company's high-definition televisions.

Panasonic similarly has beefed up its DVD camcorder lineup but has also introduced a petite camcorder that relies solely on SD flash-memory cards for storage. And JVC, the first major manufacturer to bring hard drives to camcorders in 2004, is betting on that format and ignoring the DVD camcorder segment altogether.

Chris Chute, an IDC analyst, forecasts that MiniDV will represent 31 percent of the market in 2009, down from 54 percent in 2005. DVD camcorders, which first appeared in 2001, should climb to a 27 percent share by 2009, up from 20 percent in 2005.

Meanwhile, camcorders that use large-capacity hard drives as a built-in storage medium will claim a 23 percent share by 2009, up from 8 percent in 2005, Chute predicted. Flash memory camcorders will grow to 19 percent, up from 9 percent.

Thanks to other gadgets, like the popular iPod, "the average consumer understands hard drives, and they understand their high capacity, said Dave Owen, a general manager at JVC Co. of America. He said the company believes the days of tape-based or DVD camcorders somewhere down the road won't exist."

JVC also offers a new compatible DVD burner that lets users transfer video from its hard-drive camcorders directly onto DVDs, eliminating the need to transfer footage onto a PC.

Yet MiniDV camcorders offer the highest image quality because they don't digitally compress the video as much. By comparison, hard-drive, flash and DVD camcorders heavily compress a recording, usually in the MPEG 2 video format, to squeeze as much data as possible onto the storage medium. As a result, the pictures are not as sharp.

Images are even blurrier on flash camcorders that use an even more compressed MPEG 4 format.

But White and other buyers of DVD camcorders and its newer digital cousins have been willing to sacrifice some image quality in favor of convenience.

White pulls out the homemade DVDs every few weeks to watch them with his family. His 4-year-old daughter's "Princess Birthday" has had five repeat showings already.

"That one will go down in history," he said.