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FEATURE
THE CASE FOR CAMCORDERS...
INTRO
What have the Duke of Edinburgh and Kylie Minogue got in
common? They both have camcorders, how much longer can you afford to buck the
trend?
COPY
Camcorders have been around
for a little over ten years, longer if you count the appearance of a Sony concept model in October 1980, on a US TV
programme called The Tomorrow Show. The first recognisable production machine
was the Sony Betamovie BMC-1000 which arrived in late 1983. It was a huge lump
of a thing, mainly because it used Betamax tape cassettes; it had no replay
facilities, so recordings could only be played on a Beta VCR. It cost over
£1000 -- equivalent to almost £2,000 at today's prices -- and Noel Edmunds
hosted the UK press launch, not a very auspicious start...
JVC gave the market the
kick-start it needed in early 1984, with the GR-C1, the world's first
fully-featured compact camcorder. It could playback on any TV, it used tiny
VHS-C cassettes -- compatible with VHS VCRs -- it cost less than £1,000, had a
cameo role in the movie Back To The Future, and JVC covet a photograph of the Duke
of Edinburgh wielding one at a polo match; it couldn't fail...
By the late eighties Sony
had regained lost ground with their innovative 8mm system, sales were climbing
at an unprecedented rate and for a few heady months they even outstripped those
other eighties techno icons, walkmans, video games and home computers. Year on
year sales kept on rising and in 1989 Sony launched the CCD-TR55, a milestone in camcorder technology. It was
the first truly pocket-sized camcorder or 'palmcorder' as it, and its many
imitators, became known. The TR55 quickly became a fashion accessory for the rich and famous, Kylie Minogue rarely
appeared in public without hers, really! Prices fell, sales grew and pundits
confidently predicted every home would have one by the turn of the century,
then in 1992 the bubble burst. Sales graphs which previously had never gone in
any direction other than up began to veer groundwards and camcorders were no
longer flavour of the month.
So what went wrong? Not
surprisingly much of the blame can be apportioned to the 1992 currency crisis
and ensuing world recession, suddenly people found other, more important,
things to spend their money on. As a result of unfavourable exchange rates
prices rose sharply last year -- an almost unheard of phenomenon -- further
dampening an already depressed market. At the risk of sounding like a
Government spokesperson on auto pilot, there are now signs of a recovery. Sales
are still sluggish but confidence is returning and manufacturers have begun look
forward once again, at the huge untapped market that includes the deviant 90%
of UK households who still do not, as yet, own a camcorder.
One of their more
successful strategies has been to try and steer video movie-making away from
its 'teccy' image. They're achieving that with a new generation of machines
aimed at first-time users and technophobes. Sharp were the first to hit upon
the idea of making a camcorder look more friendly and unthreatening with its
own built-in miniature TV screen, they called it View Cam and it quickly became
a best-seller in Japan, the US and it's showing signs of doing the same over
here. Sony have hit back with a curious looking machine called the Handycam
'Vision' which goes on sale in the UK this Spring. Others will follow as surely
as night follows day, creating the inevitable flood of video 'instamatics'.
Ultimately these new machines are a blind alley and do little to address the
commonest problem for video novices, what to do with it once the novelty has
worn off...
Fortunately there are
plenty of people who want something a little more challenging than a basic
point and shoot camcorder, to shoot the kids on holiday? Their needs are not
being ignored and there's never been so many machines with genuinely useful
features, including eye-catching digital effects, post-production facilities
and editing systems. Within this fertile middle-ground of video movie-making
there are the serious users who continue to exploit and explore the limits of
the medium, everyone in fact from budding pop-promo makers to young artists and
enthusiasts. They form a well established sub-culture from which the first
mainstream movie directors and technicians will surely emerge. It's only a
matter of time, but those who cut their directorial teeth on domestic
camcorders can only have climbed a few rungs of the industry ladder in the few
years camcorders have been around.
So is it the right time to
buy a camcorder, and what are your chances of becoming a famous Hollywood
director? If you've got the money, and
the rest of life's necessities now is as good a time to buy as any. New
camcorder prices are gradually coming down and there are some real bargains to
be had if you don't mind shopping around, or bearing the stigma of last year's
model. Avoid buying a bargain basement budget machine -- anything less than
£600 or so -- you will quickly become
bored with it and your prospects of reaching Hollywood fall from almost zero,
to zero!
BOX 1 -- GET SERIOUS!
If you think you're going
to get sucked into this hobby, or you want to get creative then check out the
courses on offer at your local college of further education, you'll find
details in public libraries, along with information on any video clubs in the
area. There's plenty of commercial courses running all year round, including
weekends breaks, activity holidays, even cruises; details can be found in the
back of specialist camcorder magazines, such as Video Camera, Camcorder User
and What Camcorder.
BOX 2 -- FORMATS
Two formats, two
sub-formats, three cassette styles, it's a jungle out there! Basically there's
only two formats to worry about, unless you're going to get serious. They're
VHS-C and 8mm. VHS-C is ordinary VHS tape in a cigarette-pack sized cassette
that lasts up to 45 minutes. C-cassettes can be replayed on any normal VHS VCRs
using an adaptor. 8mm cassettes are smaller, and last longer -- up to two hours
-- but they're incompatible with VHS
VCRs. Picture quality is about the same on both formats, 8mm mono
machines sound better than their VHS-C counterparts but there's little to
choose between machines with stereo soundtracks. Both formats have spawned
higher-quality sub-formats, known as Super VHS-C and Hi8; picture and sound
quality are comparable but in both cases improvements are only really apparent
on newer TVs fitted with 'S-Video' inputs. Recordings cannot be replayed on
'low-band' machines (i.e. 8mm and VHS-C) machines. Lastly there's full-size VHS
and Super VHS camcorders, they're big, too big to lug around, but pros and
wedding videographers love 'em because of the longer continuous recording
times, up to four hours on a single cassette.
BOX 3 -- CHOICES
If you're just starting
out, on a tight budget, then the JVC GR-AX35 at £600 and Samsung E808 are worth considering. The Panasonic
NV-R10 (£700) and Sony TR-303 (£750) have more creative facilities, but if you
can afford a little more then the extra picture quality and gadgetry on the
Sony FX500 (£800) and Sanyo VM-EX30 (£800) are worth having. If money is not a problem the Panasonic S85
(£1,200) and Sony TR8 (£1100) are a pair of top-end screamers that will keep
you amused for hours
BOX 4 -- SOCIAL BLUNDER?
Blame it on Smith and
Jones, Jeremy Beadle and a bunch of tea-drinking chimps they've all done their
bit to give camcorders a real image problem. On the naff scale of one to ten
they come somewhere between an Escort XR3i at number six, and mobile phones at
number seven. Camcorder-toting Anoraks make nuisances of themselves at parties
and weddings and other people's holiday videos should be banned by law...
That's the view from the
non-camcorder owning side of the fence. Everything changes when you get one in
your hand. Suddenly you're a movie director, the blood of Hitchcock, Spielberg
and Eisenstein coursing through your veins. You find yourself actually enjoying
filming family and friends making pratts of themselves, you even make a few
cameo appearances of your own. It's fun, mostly harmless, unless you inflict it
on others or send in a tape to You've Been Framed, so don't knock it until
you've tried it....
---end---
1994 0403
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