A friend who had recently bought a digital camcorder enthused that the picture quality was fantastic and the unit only about the size of Walkman.
'Yeah, and pigs might fly out of my eight-track tape deck,' I thought. I had seen camcorders go from VHS and Betamax to High Band 8mm and Super VHS. Heck, I had sold 8mm cameras in college. The quality already was great and I was sceptical about a tiny digital videocassette's ability to hold enough data for a large TV picture without compression noise problems.
Think about it for a second. A CD holds 650 megabytes of data, yet the images in an Mpeg movie look terrible in comparison with even VHS tapes because of the necessary compression on to CD.
Compression causes losses in colour range and detail, and creates super-large pixels, called compression blocks, in the images. It is not until you get to DVDs, which store 2.1 gb or more, that you have room to record an image which is better than a laser disc.
I borrowed five of the latest models from three leading makers and put them through their paces.
This is not a true buyers' guide. The five models described here do not even begin to cover what is available, but it should give some idea of what these cameras can do.