Year 2002 in camcorders: Developing technologies on the brink of High Definition

by Robin Liss
Published on Dec 31, 2002 12:00 AM



Many advancements occured in the year 2002 in camcorders. Mostly, it was manufacturers pushing the limits of existing technology. However, existing technology (especially the MiniDV tape format) are going to soon be unable to handle the demands of consumers for higher quality and more features out of their camcorders. Many of advances in 2002 were towards higher quality video, or higher resolution CCDs, plus we saw the first step towards bringing High Definition video to prosumers, the future of all television, film and video, These are all signs that High Definition camcorders - with video quality like nothing we've seen before - are on the horizon for the consumer market.

First Unlimited solid state video recording at relatively good quality with the MPEG-MX in DCR-TRV740 announced at CES in January Taking the next major step towards tapeless recording, Sony announced the MPEX-MX feature for the newDigital8 camcorders for 2002, which was then built into the new MiniDV models for 2002. The feature enables the camcorder to record 320 x 240 MPEG2 video, 30 frames per second and is pretty good looking MPEG video. The video is recorded onto Memory Sticks, their proprietary flash card format. As I've predicted in my 2003 predictions article, I believe this technology will develop into the first practical, high quality tapeless camcorder.

First to use 3 CCD pixel shifting for digital stills NV-MX5000 announced in Japan in May Although they haven't brought the model to the US, the NV-MX5000, which Panasonic has introduced in Japan uses pixel shifting to achieve over 2 Megapixel resolution stills. However, Sony is now putting a 2 Megapixel CCD in their DCR-IP220 (review here), achieving the same still quality. Pixel shifting is a technology that has a lot of potential. Developing CCDs that are small enough to fit into today's camcorders but have enough pixels to produce a High Definition image at a low price is almost impossible. However, it may be possible to use pixel shifting to develop camcorders that can shoot High Definition video inexpensively in the next few years.

First 2 Megapixel CCD Camcorder (only for the stills though) DCR-IP220 Announced in August in Japan, but brought to the US a few months later, the DCR-IP220 was the first camcorder to include a 2 Megapixel CCD, however those Megapixels only went towards still quality. Once the tape format catches up, a 2 Megapixel CCD or larger will be the next step to high definition recording.

Color Night Shot Introduced and Spread to All Models Sony started the trend with their 2002 models. Canon and Panasonic and JVC have followed with their own Color Night Shots which add color to the terrible looking old green style 0 LUX no light Nightshot feature of camcorders past. Although the color night shot is unusable in my opinion at this time, a possible mixture of color night shot with well performing low light CCDs might mean that we are close to solving the poor performance of consumer camcorders in low light shooting conditions.

First prosumer High Definition (HD) camcorder JVC displayed the first prototype of a prosumer (sub $10,000) High Definition camcorder at CEATEC in Japan in September Possibly the biggest news of the year, HD camcorders are the next step in the camcorder market. This is the biggest jump in camcorder picture quality technology since the invention of MiniDV. Whether or not the model displayed at CEATEC will actually come to the market is pretty irrelevant. The importance of this event is that it signals that the manufactures are working on HD camcorders for the prosumers, and eventually the prosumers.

Sony moves away from the Digital8 line Although it hasn't been officially announced, Sony is moving away from the camcorder line that brought Digital to the masses Sony won't likely announce it until CES in January in 2003, however in December of 2002 we learned that Sony was moving from five Digital8 models down to just two; from an internal Sony document exclusive to Camcorderinfo.com. The document also revealed that the company is increasing the number of their low priced MiniDV models. People have been predicting it for years but it's finally going to happen in 2003.

Camcorderinfo.com surpasses competitors with the most free articles and most visitors per month of consumer and prosumer camcorder web sites Because of you the visitors, Camcorderinfo.com has become the largest and most popular consumer camcorder news web site on the web. According to data from an independent web traffic analysis company, Alexa, Camcorderinfo.com receives more traffic than any other consumer video or camcorder web site around, and more than double the visitors of it's largest competitor. We've increased our news coverage and set a goal of publishing at least one feature article every week day. The number of Camcorderinfo.com message board subscribers has surpassed 3000, and we get 6,000-8,000 unique visitors a day. I hope that you will continue to get your news and information about camcorders from Camcorderinfo.com. If you have any other news items that you think should be added to this list, please post them as a comment below and we'll revise the article. Also, if you have any ideas of how Camcorderinfo.com can improve in the next year please post them onto this article. Thank you for making 2002 such a great year in camcorders!

Harvey Liss Contributed to this Article