The inexorable march away from tapes and discs has picked up steam in Camcorder Land—and this trend will continue until MiniDV and DVD home video makers take their place on the obsolete shelf next to Walkman cassette music players and analog televisions. This won’t happen overnight, but it’s happening right in front of our eyes as flash-based and hard disk drive camcorders win-over the public and take share from competing formats. Basically, it’s the iPod Phenomenon dramatically reshaping the camcorder biz. According to industry execs, tape and DVD cam sales are dropping while the new—and definitely cooler—formats take over. Almost all of the recent releases were memory card, flash or HDD based. And many of them are high-definition. I’m a big fan of high-def hard drive camcorders because their storage capabilities can’t be beat. It’s great not worrying if you have enough blank tape or DVDs for saving memories. And the small size and weight of flash-based models is also a winner. Finally, a high-definition camcorder is the only way to go, even though they’re much more expensive than SD ($799 USD is still about the cheapest, compared to $250 USD for MiniDV). With these preferences on the table, I was happy to test a new JVC HD Everio with a 120GB HDD. This high-def camcorder saves up to 15 hours of best-quality AVCHD video plus it performs several other unique tricks we’ll disclose on the following pages. Is it worth 1,300 clams? Read on, read on…
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