| Kevin Shaw |
January 5th, 2006 12:07 PM |
The problem with the Sanyo camera is that it uses a fairly low bit rate, so what if we extrapolate this in the other direction for professional purposes?
What if someone took the basic design of the Panasonic HVX200, substituted an MPEG2 or MPEG4 encoder with a bit rate suitable for off-the-shelf flash memory cards (say 3-5 MB/sec), and was thus able to record several minutes of good HD video on memory costing $200-300 instead of $1700 for P2? Leave out some of the other features of the HVX200 and you could make a nice HD camera for maybe half the price using memory costing 1/8th the price per minute of recording, and that would be a tapeless camera suitable for a wider audience. Plus you'd have the advantage of being able to buy extra memory cards almost anywhere if you need some in a pinch, which is a good thing.
I recently argued that something like this isn't likely in the near future, but looking at current trends it's conceivable someone could do it soon. And if such a camera came out another year or two from now when memory is even cheaper and capacities are higher, it should be feasible by then to fit an hour of HD on two standard memory cards costing under $400 total -- which starts to sound realistic. Imagine being able to get quality comparable to the HVX200 from a camera which costs about $5K including four hours worth of memory...
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