Hard Drive Camcorders:

Skip the tapes and DVDs

By The Vann’s Editorial Team

DVDs are a vast improvement on VHS, but wouldn't it be easier to forgo external storage mediums altogether? Star Trek-y as that may sound, I'm not talking about implanting a chip in your head, Data. Let your camcorder "boldly go," and save you the embarrassment of the glittery one-piece jumpsuit. The experience of needlessly missing that once-in-a-lifetime event due to running out of tape or disc space is so 20th century. It's time we evolved.

Maybe you've already taken step one out of the techno-primordial muck and moved to DVD, maybe you haven't. Maybe you still shoot in VHS. Leap onto land! Skip a few millennia spent in the warm and shallow pools of late adaptation by buying a hard drive camcorder today.

Hard drive camcorders can record up to 11 hours of DVD-quality video; in comparison, it would take approximately 35 discs to capture the same duration on DVD. Playback is easy, too, with multiple outputs allowing convenient TV connection, dubbing to a media center, and transfer to a computer for DVD editing or posting on the Internet. You can even create DVDs without a computer using an optional DVD burner. One major benefit of recording your videos to a hard disk drive is random access memory. You can quickly locate desired material, effortlessly delete unwanted material, and easily rearrange the playback sequence. Scene selection is equally easy thanks to personalized icons displayed on the device's LCD screen. Pretty nifty stuff, if not exactly dilithium crystal space propulsion technology. So, until we each have a private holodeck in the spare bedroom of our apartments, settle for the best modernity has to offer — a hard drive in your home camcorder.