Usually, the death of tape is a good thing. Not many people survey their DVD collections and pine for the VCR days, or heft their iPods and mourn for the days of eight-tracks and cassettes.
But in camcorders, the demise of tape is a little more complicated.
Most consumer camcorders still record onto tape — they’re the last gadget holdout — but that won’t last much longer. According to the NPD Group, sales of MiniDV digital tape camcorders are plummeting, from about half the market last year to only 31 percent this year. Camcorders that record onto miniature DVDs (29 percent) or little hard drives (22 percent) are about to overtake them.
The reason, obviously, is the hassle factor. Even now, you might have cassettes that are piling up in your closet, recorded but unwatched, simply because it takes so much time and effort to find the right tape and then the part you want. If you had a DVD camcorder, you may figure, you could just grab your cruise vacation disc and pop it into your TV’s DVD player.
Maybe you still hope to edit all your tapes someday into enjoyable, watchable highlight reels. After all, both Macs and Windows PCs come with software that lets you edit MiniDV footage and then burn the resulting masterpiece onto a DVD, or play it back onto a fresh tape with 100 percent of the original picture quality.
But life keeps intruding on your plans, and you’re finally giving up on the fantasy that you’ll really edit those piles of tapes. Meanwhile, these new tapeless camcorders end the tyranny of rewinding and fast-forwarding; you can jump directly to play back any scene. Who could resist?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/technolo...&ei=5087%0A
