Dual Digicam

Small is beautiful, especially in portable electronic devices such as Walkman-like audio recorders and players, camcorders, and digital cameras. Sony, along with JVC, perhaps the most adroit companies in the industry in designing and marketing ever-smaller recording devices, has just introduced a new digital camcorder format that reduces the overall size and weight of both the camera itself and the cassette it uses, increases battery life by a substantial amount, and represents a major overall improvement in ease-of-use.This new camcorder makes use of what Sony calls the MICRO-MV cassette. This cassette is one of the smallest audio or video cassettes ever developed, and is more or less the size of an audio dictation-type micro-cassette, measuring just 46x30.2x8.5mm (1.8x1.2x0.3 inches). Compared with the standard DV "Mini-Cassette" now used with all DV digital video camcorders, which measures 66x48x12.2mm (2.6x1.9x0.5 inches roughly), the MICRO-MV cassette occupies only 30 percent of the volumetric space required for the earlier DV cassette.The tape used in the MICRO-MV cassette is the same width as in an analog audio cassette, 3.81mm (0.150 inches), whereas the standard DV cassette uses quarter-inch-wide (6.35mm) tape. The tape coating is an advanced form of Sony’s "AME" (Advanced Metal Evaporated) thin-film cobalt metal formulation. The recorded track-width is only five microns, itself an amazing achievement. To assure error-free data recovery on playback, each track is read twice, and the two readouts compared in a buffer. The recording system, which of course is helical-scan, makes use of MR (magneto-resistive) heads, the same kind of heads now used in all hard-disk drives.This new camcorder, Sony’s Model DCR-IP7, is available for sale only in Japan at this time. It is not inexpensive ---- ¥170,000 ($1,415), but not super-expensive either, at least as digital camcorders go. The camcorder measures 103x80x47mm (4.05x3.15x1.85 inches), weighs just 370 grams (23 ounces), and includes the "Bluetooth" wireless transmission system now becoming popular in Japan. "Bluetooth" allows one to transmit digital data to a receiving device such as a PC without the need for cables of any kind. The camcorder is shown in the photo at the left. The cassette provides 60 minutes of recording time at standard speed, and uses the MPEG-2 encoding system.Exciting as this new, highly miniaturized digital camcorder is, Sony notes that it is only an interim device. The future of portable devices, including digital camcorders, according to Sony, lies in eliminating tape drives and tape cassettes altogether. This would eliminate all moving parts, allow still greater miniaturization, much improved battery life, and almost instantaneous location of any sequence in the recording. The recording medium to be used will, of course, be the flash-memory cards already widely used in digital cameras, audio MP-3 players, and as a supplement to the tape cassette in most digital camcorders. Sony has indicated that it will introduce digital camcorders using an advanced version of its "Memory Stick" media sometime in 2003. These "Memory Stick" media are about 50x22x2.8mm in size (2.0x0.87x0.11 inches), and initially will provide one gigabyte of storage capacity, with a 2 Mbit/second data-transfer rate. This will be sufficient capacity to provide 60 minutes of high-quality video, using MPEG-4 encoding schemes.