Car VHS VCRs & Players

A camcorder is a portable electronic device for recording video images and audio onto an internal storage device. The camcorder contains both a video camera and (traditionally) a videocassette recorder in one unit, hence its portmanteau name. more...

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This compares to previous technology where they would be separate.

The earliest camcorders, developed by companies such as JVC, Sony, and Kodak, used analog videotape, but since the mid-1990s (and even before that in professional markets), camcorders recording digital video have become the norm.

History

Video cameras were originally designed for broadcasting television images — see television camera. Cameras found in television broadcast centres were extremely large, mounted on special trolleys, and wired to remote recorders located in separate rooms. As technology advanced, miniaturization eventually enabled the construction of portable video-cameras and portable video-recorders.

Prior to the introduction of the camcorder, portable video-recording required two separate devices: a video-camera and a VCR. Specialized models of both the camera and VCR were used for mobile work. The portable VCR consisted of the cassette player/recorder unit, and a television tuner unit. The cassette unit could be detached and carried with the user for video recording. While the camera itself could be quite compact, the fact that a separate VCR had to be carried generally made on-location shooting a two-man job.

In 1982, two events happened that eventually led to the home camcorder boom: JVC introduced the VHS-C format, and Sony released the first professional camcorder named Betacam. VHS-C was essentially VHS with a reduced-size cassette that had been designed for portable VCRs. Sony's Betacam was a non-betamax-compatible standard developed as for professional camcorders, which used S-video (separated luminance & chroma signals) to provide a superior picture. At first, cameramen did not welcome Betacam, because before it, carrying and operating the VCR unit was a work of a video engineer; after Betacam, they came to be required to operate both video camera and VCR. However, the cable between cameramen and video engineers was eliminated. For this reason, the freedom of cameramen has improved dramatically and Betacam became standard.

In 1983, Sony released the Betamax=based Betamovie for consumers, the first domestic camcorder. A novel technique was used to reduce the size of the spinning video head drum, which was then used for many subsequent camcorders. The unit was bulky by today's standards, and since it could not be held in one hand, was typically used resting on a shoulder. Some later camcorders were even larger, because the Betamovie models had only optical viewfinders and no playback or rewind capability. Most camcorders were and still are designed for right-handed operation, though a few possessed ambidextrous ergonomics.

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