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 March 15, 2006 The Unwinding of Videotape I’ve always been fond of magnetic recording tape. I started messing around with audio tape when I was a kid, and this led me to video when that was still in its infancy (see "The Uphill Battle of an Audio Prize Winner" in April 2003). I bought my first VCR in the late 1970s, when it cost more than a grand to get anything at all. I began reviewing camcorders in 1985, when they were a novelty. All of those early camcorder systems were tape-based and entirely analog.Well, analog is virtually dead now. A recent visit to half a dozen local electronics emporia revealed only a few models, and the same two in virtually every store: a single Hi8 and one S-VHS-C. If you have a backlog of tapes in either of those formats and your old camcorder is on its last legs, you might want to pick up one of these units while you can, if only to dub your library to a more current format. But until recently, tape still dominated the world of camcorders, even the digital variety. A quick look at a recent rundown of the camcorders currently being sold showed that about two-thirds of them use tape, and all but two use the MiniDV format. (The alternative format is Digital 8, used in a few Sony models.) Recordable-DVD designs accounted for about a quarter of the total, and the rest were a mix of hard-disk, flash-memory, and high-definition models. Now, at least one press report coming out of January’s 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas suggests that even MiniDV is on the way out. It won’t be long before tape will be replaced entirely by DVD, hard-disk, or other nonmagnetic recording formats. While touring the local electronics shops, I suggested that MiniDV might be a thing of the past and received some revealing responses. Most pooh-poohed the idea, at least in the short term, though it should be noted that in each case their stock was heavily weighted toward MiniDV. The one dealer who agreed with me, while a close follower of the industry, in fact carried no camcorders at all, and so had no axe to grind one way or the other. But as far as the different formats are concerned, the stock in those stores basically represents last year’s wisdom. A quick examination of what companies were offering at CES for the coming year shows that the prediction of MiniDV’s demise might well be accurate. As far as new products are concerned, MiniDV accounts for less than 40% of the total (Digital 8 has dropped to a single model), and DVD recorders are only a few points behind. Though there are still lots of older models on the shelves that will not be represented in such an examination of new products, the trend is clear. Is this a good thing? The ability to pop a disc out and play it in your DVD player is enticing, but I wonder how many people actually did that with their old VHS-C tapes, which had the same advantage. If you have ambitions to dump your videos onto a PC for editing, however, DVD’s heavy digital compression puts it at a definite disadvantage, in the eyes of many. We may have to simply put up with the eventual demise of tape and hope that some new system will offer the advantages of both. Oh wait . . . another new format? ...Ian G. Masters
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