The Perfect DV Camcorderby Robin LissPublished on Jun 22, 2004 12:00 AM 
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Take a moment to picture the perfect camcorder. It records at 1024 x 768 resolution. It has a 120x optical zoom and three hundred speeds of variable spped zoom. It has 3 CCD at 10 million pixels each! It records to DVD-R's and it has a wireless microphone built in! It has every manual control available and you can use it in almost no light!
There is not a camcorder out there with this many features but its not to far away. Currently we have camcorders that have 2.1 million CCD's. The 1024 x 768 resolution may be in the sky right now, but as HDTV becomes more and more saturated into the market, we'll see more and more 1024 x 768 camcorders. Currently the cheaprest one is made by Sony with a grand price tag around $150,000!
As for the optical zoom, they are getting better and better as manufacturers learn how to fit more and more lens into a camcorder. Curently the Digital8's pack around a 22x optical max, not to bad. The 3CCD's aren't unreachable, infact you can get a TRV-900, which packs 3 CCD's for around $1200.
As for the DVD-R, I belive in a year or two we may start seeing afordable DVD-R, and a year or two after that in the camcorder. Currently the ownly affordable DVD-R is made by pionneer, but it costs $5000. Hitachi and Sharp seem to always be the first to makret with a hi-tech recording capability in their camcorder but that camcorder never takes off. Hitachi even recently displayed a DVD-R camcorder at a trade show but we must image the price was huge! We really though won't need DVD-R recording until our CCD's record at 1024 x 768 so don't be disapointed.
Maybe it won't be too long until we see the dream camcorder. With computing technology and video technology converging, and with the rapid growth of computer technology (moore's law states that computing power doubles every year), camcorder technology won't take too long to catch up!