You literally went through my same timeline of camcorders. I still have them all, kept for prosperity.. My favorite camcorder of all time, is the Canon HV20. One of the first consumer camcorders EVER that could shoot real progressive scan, 24p video on MiniDV tape. It was amazing and the quality still holds up today. I spent an absolute ridiculous amount of money on it back in 2007.
Love the little social documents on those tapes snd media. Fascinating how styles and approaches have changed before home editing and social media have become the norm.
I loved this video. The MiniDV camera I got as a HS graduation gift was a huge part of my life. The transition to a few years later was a big part of my early pro video career. A big challenge at that point was finding a computer that could play back the exported video. We resorted to playing a 720p WMV file on an XBOX 360 over VGA to project our senior film in HD.
I bought my first FullHD 1080P camera back in 2008 to create videos for my TH-cam channel, and I used it until the end of 2019. Then my channel took off, and I switched to 4K. However, I still use it for live streaming, and occasionally for shooting certain video scenes. It's a Samsung, and its quality is pretty subpar, but it records to an SD card. I'm not currently using a DSLR; I have one, but I never use it.
I still love the picture style of the old MiniDV camcorders in 4:3 format. Even today, old documentaries that were filmed with a Sony VX1000/VX2000 or a Canon XL1/XL2 are still shown on television every now and then. I like the colors of the CCD sensors and the endless depth of field. Bokeh is more for photography. But maybe it's just because I'm over 50 😂
It's strange how nostalgic this topic already is. The consumer camcorder market is pretty much dead by now, even the higher ended models are all relatively old now, and still most models won't do any more than 4K 25p/30p, you'd think after all these years 50p/60p would be much more common... Back in 2009 I got a Panasonic SDR-S26 camcorder that recorded on SD cards. A Canon FS200 would have been a better choice, but I was fooled by the Panasonic boasting optical image stabilization, which turned out to be rather ineffective, and 70x optical zoom, which was useful only a few times, but severely reduced low light sensitivity at all times. There was a lot of confusion around these early SD card camcorders, for some reason they saved the videos with a .mod file extension, instead of .mpg, you had to rename them (or use a program that did that automatically). And most free editing software had no support for mpeg2. I had to use a video converter and convert the videos to something the Windows XP Movie Maker would support, which reduced the quality even further... It was all very interesting, but thankfully we have come a long way since then...
Video editing software always seems to lag behind the technology used to create video. For example, iMovie didn't support MicroMV until 2008, five years after the format was discontinued!
@@vwestlife I'm surprised they even bothered adding support for MicroMV, given that it had already been discontinued. The last time I checked iMovie did not support rendering 4K 50p/60p, I don't know if that support has since been added...
6:39 I got an HDR-UX20 about 2 months ago after I saw CRD's video about DVD camcorders. When I saw the listing on Avito, I immediately bought it. Very amazing to see such a rare 15-year old camcorder be on sale, especiialy in it's condition and tbe accessories. Sadly, the proprietary Memory Stick Duo slot forced me to buy the adapter from MS Duo to microSD, but at least the microSDs are really cheap these days. 11:39 It's too sad that Sony stopped making mid-tier CX6xx series, so I had to buy a CX620 from Avito as a good starter kit to make TH-cam videos. 5:18 TH-cam *DOES* officially support 5.1 Surround sound, but I'd still agree with you, since you can only really watch these in 5.1 Surround sound on TV version of TH-cam app.
Well done overview. If you can find one the 2008 vintage Canon TX1 is quite a jewel-like marvel.I had one and shot thousands of pictures and video with it.I gave it away a while ago and it's still in use.
Thank you SO MUCH for making this video!!!!!!!!!!!! In the 2000's I was a young child and my family was pretty poor, so when we recorded stuff we almost immediately sold the camera after getting the footage off of it, except for one that is. So buying them now, I don't know too much about them. This was a pretty good video, it explains things simple enough for me to understand!
Oh my God this is going to be a nostalgia Memory to me. I remember most of my friends has a least a camcorders most were Hi8, Digital 8 and VHS-C. Eventually my father got one it was a Samsung Sc-D353 MiniDV Camcorder and I remember using a lot mostly in family holiday trips. Eventually I move on with a Panasonic HC-V180k Full Hd camcorder for short time, but man that Samsung MiniDV Camcorder was fun to use and plus it has FireWire, it made me the editing stuff much easier.
The 2000s were absolute hell for recording, honestly. Terrible solid state media with low quality and meagre storage, or crap tapes that would take you an eternity to transfer via firewire to your mac. I really DON'T miss the time at all.
It was not only Sony who offered AVCHD camcorders that recorded to Mini-DVD. In fact, the very first AVCHD specification allowed Mini-DVDs only! But several months later it was extended to allow other types of media like HDDs and memory cards. Mid-2000s was the time when the capacity of memory cards was increasing almost monthly, so it became clear that cards would outpace Mini-DVD very soon in capacity and affordability. I have never cared for optical media and always thought it was a stop-gap solution. I went from tapes to memory cards. As for the "HD on Mini-DVD" (not HD-DVD, this is a different beast) it was known as AVCHD Disc. You can play it in a BD player. You can also author your own from other HD footage. Officially it is limited to 18 Mbit/s. Many authoring applications can author such a disc with a DVD-like menu, and you can play it in a BD player, I have authored about a dozen of such discs using multiAVCHD.
Hey great video showing camcorders used in the 2000s(2008?). I'll add that there were phones capable of capturing videos at that time although very pixilated and often only 20 seconds of footage. Such as the Nokia 6020, 6300 and 6500slide to name a few.
I still use a Sony Handycam HDR-CX240 which I bought in 2015 for my TH-cam videos, it's done many hours of video and still looks and sounds great despite being a fairly low end model even back when I bought it (only cost me about AU$240 from Dick Smith). It supports PAL AVCHD Progressive, meaning that it supports 1080p video at 50fps, which is a bit strange but TH-cam fully supports it so I use it. Prior to that I used a Sony Handycam DCR-SX65 which I got as a Christmas present in 2011, and while it was only PAL standard definition (720x576 @ 25 fps), it was a fantastic unit and had a lot of features my HDR-CX240 lacks, including a touch screen and a built-in video light which I still miss 8 years later. If you use the right lighting and a tripod, an older HD camcorder can still look modern even now. I've gotten zero complaints about my 8-year old Handycam's video quality. I still love using a camcorder for my videos, something about a dedicated piece of hardware to do one thing and one thing only feels better to me. I've had two iPhones since I bought the Handycam in 2015 (an iPhone X and an iPhone 15), and both record "better" video, with the iPhone 15 being able to record 4K @ 60fps, but I don't like using a phone and would rather stick with my 8 year old camcorder. It's footage is easier to edit, it has a native tripod mount without requiring additional accessories, has a pretty good stereo mic, and has real optical zoom. I don't know what I'll do if it ever dies, I don't want to use my phone as a TH-cam camera, so I'll either buy the model Sony currently has, as it's almost identical, or find an older more premium HD camcorder used from back in their heyday.
The late 2000's was an interesting time for tech because it was a transitional period. I remember seeing flat screen HDTV's being sold alongside CRT TV's with built in VHS and DVD players. A lot of people still used those small CRT TV's to play their Xbox 360's and PS3's on. I was one of those people because I didn't get a HDTV until 2012.
Whats funny is apparently theres a camcorder craze right now after film/CCD camera wave subsides, some even claiming early full HD1080p camcorder with solid state storage are "vintage". Dunno how did it went down to this but at this rate they gonna drool over a mid 2000s microwave soon.
There's a Technology Connections video about a microwave from the late-90s! In exactly the same vein as his Sunbeam Toaster video, ie, they don't make em like they used to
@@kaitlyn__L Ye, just remembered about that Sharp microwave video and I had realized there are indeed people stanning microwaves, althose those were THE microwave.
Always wanted to own a camcorder just because of how the world looks through them. Not much to do with my childhood as most memories were shot on regular cameras (unless im missing some cameras from what i grabbed out of the closets and attics), but still reminds me of the times when i was more carefree. Might grab one someday.
Just the other day I was rearranging my large walk in storage cupboard in my flat (apartment to you Americans) and found my old Sony MiniDV camcorder in it's box with all accessories. Amazingly one of the batteries still held a charge and I was able to load and play a tape that turned out to be a company night out from over a decade ago. Somewhere in another storage box is my original Panasonic MinDV camcorder from 1999 along with it's accessories.
Currently I have a broken iPhone 4 and 5S in my drawer. I think after repair they will serve as perfectly adequate video recorders as I also have a 5th generation iPod Nano which records video and I am perfectly happy with its limited capabilities. Because I had a Nokia phone which could record video back in 2009, and I was completely blown away that it could do it! I took photos and videos all the time. Photos were very good, videos were weaker, but you know - a low quality camera is better than no camera! I don't understand why anybody would complain about video capabilities of any recent device.
I'll keep using my Sony FX-7 till it doesn't work anymore and then i'll probably find another one. It's a great camera even if I have to capture the tapes.
My last camcorder was a Sony HDD one with really impressive night vision. Its the one they got loads of negative press for because in the right light it can see through light clothing if switched on in the day. I never tried that (honest 🙂) but for filming wildlife in complete darkness or just walking around pitch black places using it as a night vision monocle it was fantastic. Dug it out recently and the footage isnt that great quality wise but that night vision feature is still bloody impressive.
We generally captured video onto Hi-8, then transferred the video onto VHS so that the Hi-8 could be reused for the next occasion. Probably not the best idea for video quality in hindsight :).
If they showed the actual pictures that these took on the box and advertising instead of the high resolution photos, nobody would have bought any of these cameras.
I never knew that about the first iPhone not being capable of recording video?? Especially when other (cheaper) phones of that era could!! Apple: Mid-Tech products at High Tech prices!!
The first _two_ iPhones couldn't record video: the original iPhone, and the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS, released in June 2009, was the first version which could record video, and that was only 640x480 4:3 aspect ratio video at 30 fps.
As someone from a long line of camera enthusiasts (of which i am not, My brother is though) I can tell you every quality old camera from any era was super expensive at the time and usually less than a decade later is considered junk or subpar by new standards. Rest assured that top of the line camera you just got to have today will be laughed about by the people of tomorrow. I can't believe my great grandpa, grandpa and dad paid so much for those pieces of junk, my Iphone camera is better. Says the guy who spent the same of his Iphone who's kids are already making fun of it's potato qualities. These camera companies must be rich. :)
Thank you for deinterlacing the camcorder videos and uploading in a higher resolution so that they show at the proper frame rate on youtube. So many people get this wrong.
I remember watching Marques Brownlee's camcorder episode, and I was baffled to see that production company didn't know what deinterlacing is, or didn't care to even do it.
I actually got made fun of by pulling out my Canon HV20 and using it in a guest cam during a live show. Jokes on them, it has a full sized HDMI port for easy connectivity and excellent video quality!
saved up and got the HV30 when it came out. have a box full of hd tapes. Friends used to make fun everytime i took it out! Now we cherish those memories in HD
That camera (and the HV30, and HV40) is very sellable on the used market. Still has some demand even being tape based. I used a HV30 a few weeks ago as a third camera at a performance and it got what I needed. The 63 min. tape length is the only thing I had to consider.
HDV was awesome right up until the mid 2010s if you had a camera that actually had a full HD sensor. It’s crazy how much HD video you could fit on a tape, compared to the pittance other people were getting on their silly little memory cards. And when TH-cam and Skype started to get popular, you already had the only HD webcam in town!
The problem was that HDV used MPEG-2 and 26 Mbps of bitrate. Sure, a miniDV tape could hold 13 GB of data, but note that the SD card camcorders recorded in AVC/H.264 which had lower bitrate requirements. If your camcorder recorded 12 Mbps H.264 video, the quality would be the same as HDV because of the more efficient codec. And yet you could use an 8 GB SD card and have more video than on a miniDV tape.
Yeah i sometimes connected my HV20 and even my old JVC VHS-C Camcorder to my PC and used them as Webcam and for live video capturing directly to PC :D Yeah the best thing about camcorders was you didn't have to worry about dust getting to the sensor like with DSLR cameras. I still LOVE DV tapes. Back then they really were the cheapest and most reliable storage medium for HOURS of HD video. Now SD card prices have come so low, they can actually compete with their HD Video storage capacity per Minute. But it only took another decade to come this far. :P But tapes just feel more physical and like slamming a new roll of film into your camera.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 absolutely. Nothing will be able to replicate that physical feeling. It makes me sad. Its why I want a game console like the Evercade. I want to have something physical, that I can hold in my hand, that actually MEANS something, that I can say I OWN.
My dad bought a Sony Digital-8 camcorder back in 1999, he mainly chose it so it was backwards compatible with his 8mm tapes from their 1992 Canon camcorder which had just failed. It's still going strong today. Last Christmas I bought a cheap old HP gaming laptop for £10 specifically for the fact that it had a firewire port. Using the Sony cam and firewire, I transferred all of his old videos onto the laptop with absolutely no loss in quality from the original recordings, even the oldest tapes from 1992 look good. All of the digital-8 videos even transferred with the correct date and time stamps on the files. It made a great Christmas present to give him all his old recordings on a single flash drive, and great to see my childhood again.
I worked at Target in the electronics section around 2010-2012 and your comment on "HDD" on camcorders causing confusion unlocked a memory for me. There was a customer looking at the camcorders who said they wanted an HD camcorder and was asking about one we had that had "HDD" on the side I explained that camera isn't High Definition it just has an internal hard drive and they said but it is HD because it says "HD" on the side. I just said "okay" and let them buy it, I wonder if they ever figured out it wasn't HD and looked back at our interaction and reflected on how stupid they were. I doubt it, they probably thought I was the idiot.
My parents would make home movies about me and my siblings on a Sony DVD Handycam. I still remember the videos as I turned 19 this month and wonder when can I go back to live it again.
I don't have data for this video yet, but overall on my channel, my top source of views is from smartphones, but the largest amount of my watch time is from people using computers. So the people using smartphones watch a lot of videos, but have a short attention span, while people using computers are more likely to actually watch the entire video, or at least most of it.
7:10 that's probably a dead CCD sensor... some camcorders of the era were notorious for that, like JVC's 3 CCD MiniDV camcorders. I'm grateful I got a couple of years out of mine before the CCDs went, and at least it still plays MiniDVs tapes... I just don't have a use case to play MiniDV tapes at the moment. It was a great camera when it worked though.
I still use a real camcorder to film my videos. And I don't watch videos on a smartphone, that's just weird to me. I'm too set in the ways of the world before smartphones took over. I still use a computer to watch online videos on, which would have been NORMAL back in the early 21st century. I don't know why now people think everything is better on a phone.
an on board surround sound microphone? How could that possibly be good quality. now im imagining the noise of the optics and fingers fumbling the controls coming from Atmos speakers
I still use my Panasonic NV-GS11 from 2004, a MiniDV camcorder with 24x optical zoom. As you suggest, I use a laptop with firewire (a HP nc6320) with Windows XP and Movie Maker for importing footage from the tape. I love the look of movies made with this camcorder.
I'm currently still using my Sony Handycam HDR-CX240 with a SanDisk Ultra 200GB microSDXC1 card bought at Walmart about 8-10 years ago, and personally I think it's STILL better definition than my iPhone 13 Pro Max Videocamera feature. Plus, Microsoft Windows 10 still has connection issues with trying to hook up an Apple product like my iPhone, and too slow to transfer in my computer. I can hook up my Sony camera to PlayMemoriesHome Windows software super easy and so much faster without issue. Overall, I'm still happy with my HandyCam, but also an old fart so I don't keep up with the times anymore like I used-to-could. Thanks for posting and sharing, you do great videos on electronics, past and present. Some of your older products I completely forgot about, great memories!
That HDV looks absolutely beautiful. Dont get me wrong, I adore lo-fi recording methods because they have a very nostalgic tone that reminds me of my days watching CKY and filming my friends skateboard. But HDV has a wonderful dreamy soft quality to it thats held up so well. Gonna have to try and pick one up.
The Canon HV20, HV30, and HV40 HDV camcorders were praised for not artificially boosting contrast and color saturation, like many other video cameras do. Maybe that's why it looks "soft" to you.
What about the HV10? I have that model and i love its compact size and form factor. Should i invest in one of the other models in that lineup?@@vwestlife
I’m sure retailers were thrilled about having to carry so many models and types of camcorders, and explain them to customers. 😉 Personally, I went from mini DV to an HD SD Card model to a Canon 1080p camcorder I still use today. AI upscaling helps make that last one look way more expensive than it actually is.
I had a camcorder in 2015 with 5.1 surround sound. At that time, TH-cam allowed me to upload 5.1 and anyone with surround speakers could play it back. Sadly, they took this feature away and downmixed my videos to stereo.
TH-cam supports 5.1 again! Unfortunately this is only for people playing back on TV versions of youtube. Since youtube keeps the original video files for future re-encoding, it might be worth checking whether those videos are in 5.1 on a TV or console.
I really like the way 2000s camcorder footage (especially miniDV and DVD) looks. It's hard to describe, but I guess it's the lower resolution, dimmer colors, and just so much more that just gives it a nostalgic mid to late 2000s look that is just impossible to put into words.
Great video, perfect to pick and choose what camcorder to get for the holiday season! But seriously, camcorders provide a type of video that just isn’t the same with completely digital on an iPhone or something. Don’t get me wrong, having the cameras we have now are great, but at the same time it seems like something was lost. That’s why I also enjoy using older camcorders and especially early digital cameras like Sony Mavicas! I guess you could say the same for CRT TVs and flatscreens, sure they are 4K and not as heavy, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using my CRTs, not to mention they also look cool, classic 90s/2000s styling!
Great Video! You should upload more footage you found on the tapes from thrift stores. Would be interesting to see. Just like the two kids in high school at the end that was from 2008.
PCIe FireWire cards are still being made, and work perfectly in Windows 10 on modern hardware. Apparently some devices require "legacy" FireWire drivers to be installed, but I've never needed to do that. The drivers included with Windows 10 seem to work fine for DV.
And on Mac, you can use a dongle chain (Camera -> Firewire 400 -> Firewire 800 -> Thunderbolt 2 -> Thunderbolt 3 -> Mac) and it Just Works with Final Cut Pro, from what I've heard.
5:25 You mention 5.1 doesn’t work on streaming platforms, but it absolutely does. I am a professional colourist and I often have to online / master out content. I can confirm from personal experience I can bang out a 5.1 audio track L C R LFE Ls Rs and it is correctly interpreted on TH-cam and Vimeo. :)
I should specify, I played it back using respective TH-cam and Vimeo apps on an LG C1 tv connected to a Marantz amp via HDMI eARC and the amp reported “Dolby Digital 5.1 Plus” and I could hear the channels responding correctly. :)
TH-cam doesn't support anything more than two audio channels. Surround sound only works if you encode it as Dolby Pro Logic and then use a Pro Logic decoder on the playback end. But if you just upload a video with discrete 5.1 channel audio, TH-cam will simply ignore everything except the front left and right channels.
@@vwestlife I’d be happy to work with you to help you get 5.1 working. I absolutely was getting 5.1 playback, with stereo separations in the rears, so can confirm it wasn’t a flavour of Pro Logic. Also the “stats for nerds” showed the stream was 6 audio channels playing back. I discovered this roughly 3 months ago, so perhaps it’s a fairly new thing as up until that point I too was convinced stereo was the max channel output available.
@@JarrydHall Does this work for you? It was uploaded directly from the Sony camcorder I showed in the video with the built-in 5.1 channel microphone: th-cam.com/video/mlTT0WhcD18/w-d-xo.html
loving the test footage! I remember back when I bought Sony's first HDV camcorder and back then the confusion went the other way, people saw the HD and thought it was recording on hard drive, couldn't figure out why I also used tapes :-)
I bought four Canon HV20 cameras from 2008 to 2011 and still have each of them in perfect working order. Used them in the freezing cold winter, burning hot sun, rain, dust you name it... It was the best investment I ever made. The footage from these camera was the best possible quality I could afford at the time and now with modern software like Topaz AI, my entire back catalog can be upsampled to 4K with incredible results. Here is 1080i footage from 2011 in 4K th-cam.com/video/bf4iwQQUs2k/w-d-xo.html
Sanyo had a line called Xacti. Those were a pistol like cameras who recorded H264 into an MP4 container on SD cards and some models like the HD1000 recorded full HD at 1080i.
I have been a licensed private investigator since 1995. I have used the following camcorder formats: Sony 8 mm, Sony 8 Hi mm, Sony Digital 8 mm, JVC standard definition on SD card, JVC High definition on SD Card and Canon 720p on SD Card. The only camcorders that are not broken are the JVC standard definition, except for a burnout pixel and one of the several JVC High definition camcorders and my current Canon camcorder. The problem with the Sony camcorders is that they became obsolete and all of them broke. I really loved the Sony Digital 8 mm because of the various inputs and outputs. I was able to use it as a web cam with various efforts. All of the JVC camcorders (except for the standard definition) had the same problem, the pull out monitor would go black.
I really like all these camcorders in some way. Good work on this video, Everything was explained very well, and this video had very good information all while being very entertaining. Good Job Vwestlife!
Yep my Sony HDV Handycam still takes great video and I use a Sony GV-HD700 Video Walkman to edit and playback. It looks great. I also have a Grass Valley HDMI in to Firewire out box that allows me to record any modern video onto HDV.
Wow.... The hours and hours checking out all kinds of camcorders and tech reviews spouting off buy now and save...save ..save money $$$ lol Yes ~ Smartphone ! 😉🤑👽
In 2008 I had the Nokia N85 which recorded video in VGA quality at 30fps. It actually had a 5 MP rear camera and a flash. The iPhone 3G came out the same year and while it did not come with the ability to record video, it was possible to get apps that recorded video via the newly introduced Apple App Store.
I stopped with camcorders at the Hi-8 format. Still have a bunch of tapes and the combo VHS/Hi-8 VCR to play them. My daughters will drag them out when they're feeling nostalgic. Great video and I like the collection of "handycams" (using a brand name as a generic label, a la Scotch Tape or Kleenex) that you have. Thanks for sharing.
Same here! On my kinda Old Philips Full HD LED TV, 43 in size i think. Crazy good picture right There. Looked like 4K. ANOTHER crazy thing is, that really Low quality movie rips like 640x480 looks kind of Ok on this tv (When played from Apple TV with VLC).
My first real camcorder was the DV4500 toy camera by aiptek. I shot all of my oldest TH-cam videos with it. Bought it online from best buy back in the mid 2000s. Recorded MPEG4. ASF video files onto sd memory cards. Worked great for the time. Wasn't until 2013 when I got my first android phone with a decent camcorder on it. Wasn't HD but it shot better video than my Aiptek.
Whew, the dark ages of "too many choices, none of them really right for me!" camcorders; Everything from potato camera to prosumer models. I used to get so angry at misleading/useless features from the more expensive ones, and frustrated with the build quality (yet surprising image quality) out of flippers that stopped working for no reason at all. Between 2008-2012 I had good luck with some of the mid-grade point and shoot still cameras that had video recording to SD card and that was the stop-gap solution that worked for me right up until a few years ago when phones finally got good enough to take over. SLR cameras were always a bit more quality than I needed.. once the camera body, required lenses, batteries etc totaled up. Nikon Cool Pix "Red" waterproof was one of the ones I stuck with the longest. For $99 it absolutely couldn't be beat.
I honestly wonder what camera you are using, because from time to time it doesn’t look much better than those old Camcorders - which adds to the charm of your videos.
I used Canon FS200 like the one you showed, it has good stereo audio and optical zoom, far better than modern phones do. Mine still works but its starting to show its hours, every seam is coming apart etc.. but thats because i've used it hardmounted to extremely vibrating surfaces lol
I remember walking into a Circuit city in 1995 and seeing a Sony display with their camcorders feeding TV's connected to each of the cams. It was the first time I saw a MiniDV video camera and I was blown away by the quality of the picture it was producing. That camera was a Sony VX1000 and the granddaddy of all subsequent DV cameras; including Sony's own industrial/professional lineup that would soon come out with the PD-150 that had XLR inputs and features for broadcasters and professionals, but in the same basic layout and body style. I later would use the PD-170 while working at a local TV station in the mid 2000s.
The first "real" video work I did was on a VX1000, and we soon upgraded to a VX2000. I shot a lot on that in the early days of video on websites, about 20 years ago. Eventually I moved jobs and didn't do a lot of video, but I got back into it when our graphics guys were having a clearout and handed me a barely-used Sony PD150, which is the "pro" version of the VX2000 with proper XLR inputs. I love shooting with the PD150. I haven't done anything on it for months, but it's getting into winter so there's some lovely "magic hour" light these days.
It really sucks that smartphones killed midrange camcorders. I just don't want to use my iPhone for TH-cam videos; the audio quality and of course zoom is nowhere near as good as a dedicated camera. I'm still using my Panasonic HC-V770 I bought in 2018 because there's really nothing to replace it with.
Personally, I believe if you want to get into video, you should start with the most basic model with the least number of advanced features, but while also being reasonably decent quality. Nothing will teach good skills like having a basic camera. You should hone your skill before getting a new and powerful one. There are a lot of aspects of photography or videography that are just as important to any camera you use, no matter how advanced or basic that camera may be. Getting all the basics down before jumping to a "better" platform will serve you well. Also, don't forget audio. It is trivially easy to do audio wrong. There are billions, if not trillions of hours of BAD video footage on everything from 8mm film to the latest HD youtube video spread around the world. Most of those have awful audio to boot. Get down the basics. Make a low res film (or even B&W)( with good audio first. You can hand people the best gear ever made costing millions of dollars and most people will still make a bad video. If you can make a good video with low end old gear, just imagine what you will be able to do once you get good gear. You'll use it right.
In terms of importing the video from these old formats, I can only speak to MiniDV and HDV, but back I when I dealt with those formats, I preferred the free utility WinDV to Windows Movie Maker, because it would automatically split the video tape into separate files based on the time/date data in the feed. When I had a single AVI file that had already been imported by WMM, I would use the free utility dvdate to split it up. And finally, I preferred HDVSplit for importing HDV over WMM, as WMM imports a tape as, again, a single massive file, but also as a .dvr-ms file, which I could never figure out how to use with anything else, while HDVSplit imports each clip as its own .m2t file, which is the MPEG-2 transport stream format, that a lot more programs can deal with.
In 2023, I continue to use a Panasonic HC-V520 camcorder (with its 60X optical zoom) bought in 2013. Even though many of my phones exceed its video specs, it offers many technical benefits and conveniences. There's much to be said to for "play it as it lays". If you're a maniac like me and read all the credits in documentaries, you may have noticed that the Panasonic HC-V520 camcorder is often listed as a B-roll camera used for various pickup shots for documentaries produced from 2013 to 202+. It's easy to understand why. Not great, but certainly good enough (when set to progressive 60fps).
Scored a Panasonic 4K Camcorder for $250 used recently. Its honestly an amazing camera which has all the usual camcorder quirks (night vision, huge zoom range, great IS, External mic options etc) But it shoots in 4K so it gives you a really sharp image but still retains that camcorder "look" which is great for shooting more nostalgic esque videos.
I still have 2 perfectly working Sony HDV camcorders, One with a 1 inch sensor and interchangeable lenses and another smaller HDR-HC1 (I think I have that model correct - The other I dont remember) I shot a documentary on a Musician in 2012 with a rigged out Canon 7d DSLR and used the HDV camcorders as b-roll cams. After grading it was hard to tell the difference between the HDV and the DSLR except for the cinematic DOF on tighter shots with the 7D of course. Besides deinterlacing and 1080i, at 24fps (some 3/2 pulldown trickery inside the camera) the HDV even with smaller sensors had better dynamic range and more pleasing colour science than the DSLR. HDV could also record 720p 'progressive too. HDV was a marvel for its time and I was fascinated at the quality recorded to tape. Thanks for getting into HDV instead of concentrating on the SD formats and presenting them in the correct format for us to enjoy here.
I first had a Panasonic VHS C camcorder that my uncle lended to me and used for birthdays and other parties. Then in 2002, I bought a Sony miniDV camcorder for my uncle’s wedding, which became my favorite camcorder, it had better resolution, more recording time, amazing optical zoom, long battery life! And easy to connect to the computer via FireWire, and made video copies to DVDs! I wish Sony would make a newer model of their Handycam, because I’m not a fan of action cameras like GoPro since they’re too small in lens and zoom!
You can still connect Firewire devices to a current Mac Studio M1 Ultra - I have a USB-C Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt 1 dongle, then a Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt dongle, and then a Firewire 800 to 4-Pin Firewire i-Link Cable. I can connect either my Sony DV-D200E Digital8/Hi8/Video8 Walkman or my Sony DCR-PC6E DV Handycam and they all still work with iMovie on the latest MacOS Sonoma 14.1 The other nice thing about the DV-D200E is that, as you flagged before, it acts as a great video capture device, so I can also link up any composite video & stereo audio connection in from my Philips VHS VCR or my Sony SL-F1UB Betamax and they will also link through the Firewire into iMovie too :)
I think I almost got that Sony DCR-HC51e back in 2009 but it was a little over my budget. LOVED that model a lot and sound wise it really had one heck of a Mic inside. I opted for the Samsung VP-D381 instead which i kinda regret. Since the camera recorded DV tapes with the same low-magnetic intensity in SP mode as it does in LP mode. Took me a few years to realize that though..... The first tape i recorded on it was not properly pre-magnetized. I had pre-recorded my other tapes 3 times before actually recording on them, to make sure the tapes magnetic properties would be more optimal for recording. And lo and behold... that actually helped. The recordings i did with the Samsung VP-D381 on these pre-magnetized tapes actually survived. The recordings on my very first tape without pre-recording/magnetiziatuon, is not playable anymore and just gives me glitches. it seems Samsung went wayyyy off the DV specs with their Mini DV camcorders. Which is why i wish i had bought a Sony model instead. I also remember the first SD card camcorders. I think they recorded MPEG2 files, before H264 really became mainstream on these. Same with these HDD camcorders. I think Canon's HDD variations of the HDV and SD card cameras, recorded MPEG2 Transportstream files. HDV was great and i always preferred Canon's HDV format over Sony's. Over here in Germany you could not really get new Digital8, Hi8 or VHS-C camcorders anymore in stores. Not even on clearance. You COULD however still get the tapes for it. Digital and Hi8 tapes were available wayy into the late 2010s over here.
LoL. That Kodak camera in 0:40. My parents had (and they still have it) exactly the same back in the day. I should probably get out the batteries and check if it's still working when I would have some free time. It also probably has better optics than most cameras in modern phones, because that's something you cannot reasonably miniaturize.
I had (or had used) a few of these types. My first one was a Sony Hi8 back in 96(?) and I believe it overall had the best picture quality of all. Had a Canon MiniDV and was never impressed with the quality, the artifacts were quite apparent in any kind of motion. Then had JVC everio with SD / internal memory which was absolute rubbish. I never bought into the DVD recorder ones although they were kind of popular here.
“Please don’t photographer us” 😂
😂😂😂
That was precious!
Had me laughing 😊
@@samholdsworth420Me too!!!
Is that what she said at 1:31? I too autoportrait myself sometimes.
Adorable
You literally went through my same timeline of camcorders. I still have them all, kept for prosperity.. My favorite camcorder of all time, is the Canon HV20. One of the first consumer camcorders EVER that could shoot real progressive scan, 24p video on MiniDV tape. It was amazing and the quality still holds up today. I spent an absolute ridiculous amount of money on it back in 2007.
Love the little social documents on those tapes snd media. Fascinating how styles and approaches have changed before home editing and social media have become the norm.
I loved this video. The MiniDV camera I got as a HS graduation gift was a huge part of my life. The transition to a few years later was a big part of my early pro video career. A big challenge at that point was finding a computer that could play back the exported video. We resorted to playing a 720p WMV file on an XBOX 360 over VGA to project our senior film in HD.
I somehow missed the word "HDV" that was what I shot my senior film on.
I can’t imagine how much work this took to edit this together and make it a nice viewing experience, well done!
I bought my first FullHD 1080P camera back in 2008 to create videos for my TH-cam channel, and I used it until the end of 2019. Then my channel took off, and I switched to 4K. However, I still use it for live streaming, and occasionally for shooting certain video scenes. It's a Samsung, and its quality is pretty subpar, but it records to an SD card.
I'm not currently using a DSLR; I have one, but I never use it.
I still love the picture style of the old MiniDV camcorders in 4:3 format. Even today, old documentaries that were filmed with a Sony VX1000/VX2000 or a Canon XL1/XL2 are still shown on television every now and then. I like the colors of the CCD sensors and the endless depth of field. Bokeh is more for photography. But maybe it's just because I'm over 50 😂
It's strange how nostalgic this topic already is. The consumer camcorder market is pretty much dead by now, even the higher ended models are all relatively old now, and still most models won't do any more than 4K 25p/30p, you'd think after all these years 50p/60p would be much more common...
Back in 2009 I got a Panasonic SDR-S26 camcorder that recorded on SD cards. A Canon FS200 would have been a better choice, but I was fooled by the Panasonic boasting optical image stabilization, which turned out to be rather ineffective, and 70x optical zoom, which was useful only a few times, but severely reduced low light sensitivity at all times. There was a lot of confusion around these early SD card camcorders, for some reason they saved the videos with a .mod file extension, instead of .mpg, you had to rename them (or use a program that did that automatically). And most free editing software had no support for mpeg2. I had to use a video converter and convert the videos to something the Windows XP Movie Maker would support, which reduced the quality even further... It was all very interesting, but thankfully we have come a long way since then...
Video editing software always seems to lag behind the technology used to create video. For example, iMovie didn't support MicroMV until 2008, five years after the format was discontinued!
@@vwestlife I'm surprised they even bothered adding support for MicroMV, given that it had already been discontinued. The last time I checked iMovie did not support rendering 4K 50p/60p, I don't know if that support has since been added...
5:41 - KITTY!
6:39 I got an HDR-UX20 about 2 months ago after I saw CRD's video about DVD camcorders. When I saw the listing on Avito, I immediately bought it. Very amazing to see such a rare 15-year old camcorder be on sale, especiialy in it's condition and tbe accessories.
Sadly, the proprietary Memory Stick Duo slot forced me to buy the adapter from MS Duo to microSD, but at least the microSDs are really cheap these days.
11:39 It's too sad that Sony stopped making mid-tier CX6xx series, so I had to buy a CX620 from Avito as a good starter kit to make TH-cam videos.
5:18 TH-cam *DOES* officially support 5.1 Surround sound, but I'd still agree with you, since you can only really watch these in 5.1 Surround sound on TV version of TH-cam app.
Minidv is still my go to format for days out and family events. It looks great
Well done overview.
If you can find one the 2008 vintage Canon TX1 is quite a jewel-like marvel.I had one and shot thousands of pictures and video with it.I gave it away a while ago and it's still in use.
I love the look of the videos from the first 2 camcorders you showed, truly a different time.
Thank you SO MUCH for making this video!!!!!!!!!!!! In the 2000's I was a young child and my family was pretty poor, so when we recorded stuff we almost immediately sold the camera after getting the footage off of it, except for one that is. So buying them now, I don't know too much about them. This was a pretty good video, it explains things simple enough for me to understand!
Oh my God this is going to be a nostalgia Memory to me. I remember most of my friends has a least a camcorders most were Hi8, Digital 8 and VHS-C. Eventually my father got one it was a Samsung Sc-D353 MiniDV Camcorder and I remember using a lot mostly in family holiday trips. Eventually I move on with a Panasonic HC-V180k Full Hd camcorder for short time, but man that Samsung MiniDV Camcorder was fun to use and plus it has FireWire, it made me the editing stuff much easier.
The 2000s were absolute hell for recording, honestly. Terrible solid state media with low quality and meagre storage, or crap tapes that would take you an eternity to transfer via firewire to your mac. I really DON'T miss the time at all.
really though, I’ve had a few tape based camcorders just for the fun of them but transferring videos was sooo slow lol.
Excellent collection of video cameras there.
It was not only Sony who offered AVCHD camcorders that recorded to Mini-DVD. In fact, the very first AVCHD specification allowed Mini-DVDs only! But several months later it was extended to allow other types of media like HDDs and memory cards. Mid-2000s was the time when the capacity of memory cards was increasing almost monthly, so it became clear that cards would outpace Mini-DVD very soon in capacity and affordability. I have never cared for optical media and always thought it was a stop-gap solution. I went from tapes to memory cards.
As for the "HD on Mini-DVD" (not HD-DVD, this is a different beast) it was known as AVCHD Disc. You can play it in a BD player. You can also author your own from other HD footage. Officially it is limited to 18 Mbit/s. Many authoring applications can author such a disc with a DVD-like menu, and you can play it in a BD player, I have authored about a dozen of such discs using multiAVCHD.
Hey great video showing camcorders used in the 2000s(2008?).
I'll add that there were phones capable of capturing videos at that time although very pixilated and often only 20 seconds of footage. Such as the Nokia 6020, 6300 and 6500slide to name a few.
I still use a Sony Handycam HDR-CX240 which I bought in 2015 for my TH-cam videos, it's done many hours of video and still looks and sounds great despite being a fairly low end model even back when I bought it (only cost me about AU$240 from Dick Smith). It supports PAL AVCHD Progressive, meaning that it supports 1080p video at 50fps, which is a bit strange but TH-cam fully supports it so I use it. Prior to that I used a Sony Handycam DCR-SX65 which I got as a Christmas present in 2011, and while it was only PAL standard definition (720x576 @ 25 fps), it was a fantastic unit and had a lot of features my HDR-CX240 lacks, including a touch screen and a built-in video light which I still miss 8 years later. If you use the right lighting and a tripod, an older HD camcorder can still look modern even now. I've gotten zero complaints about my 8-year old Handycam's video quality.
I still love using a camcorder for my videos, something about a dedicated piece of hardware to do one thing and one thing only feels better to me. I've had two iPhones since I bought the Handycam in 2015 (an iPhone X and an iPhone 15), and both record "better" video, with the iPhone 15 being able to record 4K @ 60fps, but I don't like using a phone and would rather stick with my 8 year old camcorder. It's footage is easier to edit, it has a native tripod mount without requiring additional accessories, has a pretty good stereo mic, and has real optical zoom. I don't know what I'll do if it ever dies, I don't want to use my phone as a TH-cam camera, so I'll either buy the model Sony currently has, as it's almost identical, or find an older more premium HD camcorder used from back in their heyday.
The late 2000's was an interesting time for tech because it was a transitional period. I remember seeing flat screen HDTV's being sold alongside CRT TV's with built in VHS and DVD players. A lot of people still used those small CRT TV's to play their Xbox 360's and PS3's on. I was one of those people because I didn't get a HDTV until 2012.
Whats funny is apparently theres a camcorder craze right now after film/CCD camera wave subsides, some even claiming early full HD1080p camcorder with solid state storage are "vintage". Dunno how did it went down to this but at this rate they gonna drool over a mid 2000s microwave soon.
There's a Technology Connections video about a microwave from the late-90s! In exactly the same vein as his Sunbeam Toaster video, ie, they don't make em like they used to
@@kaitlyn__L Ye, just remembered about that Sharp microwave video and I had realized there are indeed people stanning microwaves, althose those were THE microwave.
Always wanted to own a camcorder just because of how the world looks through them. Not much to do with my childhood as most memories were shot on regular cameras (unless im missing some cameras from what i grabbed out of the closets and attics), but still reminds me of the times when i was more carefree. Might grab one someday.
Very Cool 😎 collection , wish the blue ray camcorder was able to give a picture that would be amazing
"good thing they're not the only choice" - bravo, sir - chapeau
Still have a jvc 720p Everio that used SD card. Use it for time lapse record mostly. Good zoom too
Just the other day I was rearranging my large walk in storage cupboard in my flat (apartment to you Americans) and found my old Sony MiniDV camcorder in it's box with all accessories. Amazingly one of the batteries still held a charge and I was able to load and play a tape that turned out to be a company night out from over a decade ago. Somewhere in another storage box is my original Panasonic MinDV camcorder from 1999 along with it's accessories.
I still use my Canon HDV and use my MacBookPro from 2011 to edit it after getting the video from the camera via Firewire
Currently I have a broken iPhone 4 and 5S in my drawer. I think after repair they will serve as perfectly adequate video recorders as I also have a 5th generation iPod Nano which records video and I am perfectly happy with its limited capabilities.
Because I had a Nokia phone which could record video back in 2009, and I was completely blown away that it could do it! I took photos and videos all the time. Photos were very good, videos were weaker, but you know - a low quality camera is better than no camera! I don't understand why anybody would complain about video capabilities of any recent device.
HDD = recorded its own noises.
Video tape = flawless FPS.
Digital camera = Low response and laggy flow.
Literally just got rid of a box full of these devices at work, boxes of unused media as well
Anther excellent researched video. You left no stone unturned.
Great video, great collection!! TX for the content
I'll keep using my Sony FX-7 till it doesn't work anymore and then i'll probably find another one. It's a great camera even if I have to capture the tapes.
What HDV camcorder did you use to record the sample footage (flowers, pool and a guy speaking into a mic at a dais)? It looks really detailed for HDV!
Canon HV20.
My last camcorder was a Sony HDD one with really impressive night vision. Its the one they got loads of negative press for because in the right light it can see through light clothing if switched on in the day. I never tried that (honest 🙂) but for filming wildlife in complete darkness or just walking around pitch black places using it as a night vision monocle it was fantastic.
Dug it out recently and the footage isnt that great quality wise but that night vision feature is still bloody impressive.
First iPhone and Android phone may not record a video, but many other phones could, especially Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones, even before 2008.
We generally captured video onto Hi-8, then transferred the video onto VHS so that the Hi-8 could be reused for the next occasion. Probably not the best idea for video quality in hindsight :).
I miss Y2K Camcorder so much 😢😢😢
If they showed the actual pictures that these took on the box and advertising instead of the high resolution photos, nobody would have bought any of these cameras.
I never knew that about the first iPhone not being capable of recording video?? Especially when other (cheaper) phones of that era could!! Apple: Mid-Tech products at High Tech prices!!
The first _two_ iPhones couldn't record video: the original iPhone, and the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS, released in June 2009, was the first version which could record video, and that was only 640x480 4:3 aspect ratio video at 30 fps.
@@vwestlife That's crazy especially when the technology was available!!
I always watch TH-cam on my TVs never on my phone! it's why I pay for premium the only streaming service I pay for.
As someone from a long line of camera enthusiasts (of which i am not, My brother is though) I can tell you every quality old camera from any era was super expensive at the time and usually less than a decade later is considered junk or subpar by new standards. Rest assured that top of the line camera you just got to have today will be laughed about by the people of tomorrow. I can't believe my great grandpa, grandpa and dad paid so much for those pieces of junk, my Iphone camera is better. Says the guy who spent the same of his Iphone who's kids are already making fun of it's potato qualities. These camera companies must be rich. :)
Thank you for deinterlacing the camcorder videos and uploading in a higher resolution so that they show at the proper frame rate on youtube. So many people get this wrong.
omggggg seeing someone who even knows what that is and why it's important these days is like a breath of heaven
@@AhDollar:D hehehe that made me smile yet it is so true. Imho
I remember watching Marques Brownlee's camcorder episode, and I was baffled to see that production company didn't know what deinterlacing is, or didn't care to even do it.
@@AhDollar even legacybox doesnt do that
Can someone please explain to a newbie what deinterlacing is? Thanks!
I actually got made fun of by pulling out my Canon HV20 and using it in a guest cam during a live show. Jokes on them, it has a full sized HDMI port for easy connectivity and excellent video quality!
saved up and got the HV30 when it came out. have a box full of hd tapes. Friends used to make fun everytime i took it out! Now we cherish those memories in HD
I bought an HV30 for this exact reason. Bonus is that it can scan at 30p.
@@Crlarl The HV40 has 24p - the real thing which is a dream feature for the film festival hopeful crowd and others that want to try for the film look.
That camera (and the HV30, and HV40) is very sellable on the used market. Still has some demand even being tape based. I used a HV30 a few weeks ago as a third camera at a performance and it got what I needed. The 63 min. tape length is the only thing I had to consider.
haters always gonna hate
HDV was awesome right up until the mid 2010s if you had a camera that actually had a full HD sensor. It’s crazy how much HD video you could fit on a tape, compared to the pittance other people were getting on their silly little memory cards. And when TH-cam and Skype started to get popular, you already had the only HD webcam in town!
I still use my HVR-Z1U
The problem was that HDV used MPEG-2 and 26 Mbps of bitrate. Sure, a miniDV tape could hold 13 GB of data, but note that the SD card camcorders recorded in AVC/H.264 which had lower bitrate requirements. If your camcorder recorded 12 Mbps H.264 video, the quality would be the same as HDV because of the more efficient codec. And yet you could use an 8 GB SD card and have more video than on a miniDV tape.
Yeah i sometimes connected my HV20 and even my old JVC VHS-C Camcorder to my PC and used them as Webcam and for live video capturing directly to PC :D Yeah the best thing about camcorders was you didn't have to worry about dust getting to the sensor like with DSLR cameras. I still LOVE DV tapes. Back then they really were the cheapest and most reliable storage medium for HOURS of HD video. Now SD card prices have come so low, they can actually compete with their HD Video storage capacity per Minute. But it only took another decade to come this far. :P But tapes just feel more physical and like slamming a new roll of film into your camera.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 absolutely. Nothing will be able to replicate that physical feeling. It makes me sad. Its why I want a game console like the Evercade. I want to have something physical, that I can hold in my hand, that actually MEANS something, that I can say I OWN.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 Flash memory has gotten cheap enough that 10 euro will get you 128 GB of it. A miniDV tape can store 13 GB.
My dad bought a Sony Digital-8 camcorder back in 1999, he mainly chose it so it was backwards compatible with his 8mm tapes from their 1992 Canon camcorder which had just failed. It's still going strong today. Last Christmas I bought a cheap old HP gaming laptop for £10 specifically for the fact that it had a firewire port. Using the Sony cam and firewire, I transferred all of his old videos onto the laptop with absolutely no loss in quality from the original recordings, even the oldest tapes from 1992 look good. All of the digital-8 videos even transferred with the correct date and time stamps on the files. It made a great Christmas present to give him all his old recordings on a single flash drive, and great to see my childhood again.
I have to use an adapter that connects A/V and S-Video
VWestlife must have an incredible collection of found footage of weddings and vacations 😅
And Christmases.
they serve as a good reminder that camcorders are inherently a mistake 😂
@vwestlife did anyone from the audience recognize themselves in said footage? did they contact you?
I worked at Target in the electronics section around 2010-2012 and your comment on "HDD" on camcorders causing confusion unlocked a memory for me. There was a customer looking at the camcorders who said they wanted an HD camcorder and was asking about one we had that had "HDD" on the side I explained that camera isn't High Definition it just has an internal hard drive and they said but it is HD because it says "HD" on the side. I just said "okay" and let them buy it, I wonder if they ever figured out it wasn't HD and looked back at our interaction and reflected on how stupid they were. I doubt it, they probably thought I was the idiot.
It’s amazing how many of these actually hold up until even today. A bit of color correction and those HD videos could be shown today.
So much nostalgia in this video. I still have my Sony DV camcorder. During the 3DTV craze, Sony even made a 3D camcorder.
My parents would make home movies about me and my siblings on a Sony DVD Handycam. I still remember the videos as I turned 19 this month and wonder when can I go back to live it again.
i wonder how many people are watching this video on their computer and not on their phone. i see no reason to watch videos on a tiny screen
I don't have data for this video yet, but overall on my channel, my top source of views is from smartphones, but the largest amount of my watch time is from people using computers. So the people using smartphones watch a lot of videos, but have a short attention span, while people using computers are more likely to actually watch the entire video, or at least most of it.
7:10 that's probably a dead CCD sensor... some camcorders of the era were notorious for that, like JVC's 3 CCD MiniDV camcorders. I'm grateful I got a couple of years out of mine before the CCDs went, and at least it still plays MiniDVs tapes... I just don't have a use case to play MiniDV tapes at the moment. It was a great camera when it worked though.
The aperture is stuck shut
I still use a real camcorder to film my videos. And I don't watch videos on a smartphone, that's just weird to me. I'm too set in the ways of the world before smartphones took over. I still use a computer to watch online videos on, which would have been NORMAL back in the early 21st century. I don't know why now people think everything is better on a phone.
an on board surround sound microphone?
How could that possibly be good quality.
now im imagining the noise of the optics and fingers fumbling the controls coming from Atmos speakers
I still use my Panasonic NV-GS11 from 2004, a MiniDV camcorder with 24x optical zoom. As you suggest, I use a laptop with firewire (a HP nc6320) with Windows XP and Movie Maker for importing footage from the tape. I love the look of movies made with this camcorder.
Me too. I have 3 Panasonic models. The best one being the NV GS 320. My go to camera. Keeping the dream alive
I'm currently still using my Sony Handycam HDR-CX240 with a SanDisk Ultra 200GB microSDXC1 card bought at Walmart about 8-10 years ago, and personally I think it's STILL better definition than my iPhone 13 Pro Max Videocamera feature. Plus, Microsoft Windows 10 still has connection issues with trying to hook up an Apple product like my iPhone, and too slow to transfer in my computer. I can hook up my Sony camera to PlayMemoriesHome Windows software super easy and so much faster without issue.
Overall, I'm still happy with my HandyCam, but also an old fart so I don't keep up with the times anymore like I used-to-could.
Thanks for posting and sharing, you do great videos on electronics, past and present. Some of your older products I completely forgot about, great memories!
That HDV looks absolutely beautiful. Dont get me wrong, I adore lo-fi recording methods because they have a very nostalgic tone that reminds me of my days watching CKY and filming my friends skateboard. But HDV has a wonderful dreamy soft quality to it thats held up so well.
Gonna have to try and pick one up.
The Canon HV20, HV30, and HV40 HDV camcorders were praised for not artificially boosting contrast and color saturation, like many other video cameras do. Maybe that's why it looks "soft" to you.
The "softness" could also be because of HDV's 1440x1080resolution, instead of 1920x1080 FullHD...
@@DrCassette with TH-cam's low bitrate, the resolution difference is probably negligible
What about the HV10? I have that model and i love its compact size and form factor. Should i invest in one of the other models in that lineup?@@vwestlife
I’m sure retailers were thrilled about having to carry so many models and types of camcorders, and explain them to customers. 😉 Personally, I went from mini DV to an HD SD Card model to a Canon 1080p camcorder I still use today. AI upscaling helps make that last one look way more expensive than it actually is.
The same retailers are now either out of business or selling nothing but TVs and Washing Machines.
Which camera is that last one
I had a camcorder in 2015 with 5.1 surround sound. At that time, TH-cam allowed me to upload 5.1 and anyone with surround speakers could play it back. Sadly, they took this feature away and downmixed my videos to stereo.
TH-cam supports 5.1 again! Unfortunately this is only for people playing back on TV versions of youtube.
Since youtube keeps the original video files for future re-encoding, it might be worth checking whether those videos are in 5.1 on a TV or console.
In that year my parents used for one more time our Digital 8 camera from 2004 (SD quality) in it's 16:9 panoramic mode to record my school show lol.
I really like the way 2000s camcorder footage (especially miniDV and DVD) looks. It's hard to describe, but I guess it's the lower resolution, dimmer colors, and just so much more that just gives it a nostalgic mid to late 2000s look that is just impossible to put into words.
60fps.
@@gorak9000 And I've got one word for you, "Cataract".
@@Tester-sh1mnwhere
Great video, perfect to pick and choose what camcorder to get for the holiday season! But seriously, camcorders provide a type of video that just isn’t the same with completely digital on an iPhone or something. Don’t get me wrong, having the cameras we have now are great, but at the same time it seems like something was lost. That’s why I also enjoy using older camcorders and especially early digital cameras like Sony Mavicas! I guess you could say the same for CRT TVs and flatscreens, sure they are 4K and not as heavy, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using my CRTs, not to mention they also look cool, classic 90s/2000s styling!
Great Video! You should upload more footage you found on the tapes from thrift stores. Would be interesting to see. Just like the two kids in high school at the end that was from 2008.
See my "Lost Digital8/Hi8/MiniDV/etc. Tape" series on my vwest7ife channel.
Please don't photographer us!
PCIe FireWire cards are still being made, and work perfectly in Windows 10 on modern hardware. Apparently some devices require "legacy" FireWire drivers to be installed, but I've never needed to do that. The drivers included with Windows 10 seem to work fine for DV.
You can do it out of the box with Linux and dvgrab, and then cook it into something sensible with ffmpeg quite easily too.
And on Mac, you can use a dongle chain (Camera -> Firewire 400 -> Firewire 800 -> Thunderbolt 2 -> Thunderbolt 3 -> Mac) and it Just Works with Final Cut Pro, from what I've heard.
5:25 You mention 5.1 doesn’t work on streaming platforms, but it absolutely does. I am a professional colourist and I often have to online / master out content. I can confirm from personal experience I can bang out a 5.1 audio track L C R LFE Ls Rs and it is correctly interpreted on TH-cam and Vimeo. :)
I should specify, I played it back using respective TH-cam and Vimeo apps on an LG C1 tv connected to a Marantz amp via HDMI eARC and the amp reported “Dolby Digital 5.1 Plus” and I could hear the channels responding correctly. :)
TH-cam doesn't support anything more than two audio channels. Surround sound only works if you encode it as Dolby Pro Logic and then use a Pro Logic decoder on the playback end. But if you just upload a video with discrete 5.1 channel audio, TH-cam will simply ignore everything except the front left and right channels.
I've seen videos via yt dlp with 6 channels of audio
@@vwestlife I’d be happy to work with you to help you get 5.1 working. I absolutely was getting 5.1 playback, with stereo separations in the rears, so can confirm it wasn’t a flavour of Pro Logic. Also the “stats for nerds” showed the stream was 6 audio channels playing back. I discovered this roughly 3 months ago, so perhaps it’s a fairly new thing as up until that point I too was convinced stereo was the max channel output available.
@@JarrydHall Does this work for you? It was uploaded directly from the Sony camcorder I showed in the video with the built-in 5.1 channel microphone: th-cam.com/video/mlTT0WhcD18/w-d-xo.html
loving the test footage! I remember back when I bought Sony's first HDV camcorder and back then the confusion went the other way, people saw the HD and thought it was recording on hard drive, couldn't figure out why I also used tapes :-)
Another banger of an upload. Furiously researched and packed full of information, detailed editing, and making me hope I can choose a good camera.
And it's 13:37.
I bought four Canon HV20 cameras from 2008 to 2011 and still have each of them in perfect working order.
Used them in the freezing cold winter, burning hot sun, rain, dust you name it... It was the best investment I ever made. The footage from these camera was the best possible quality I could afford at the time and now with modern software like Topaz AI, my entire back catalog can be upsampled to 4K with incredible results. Here is 1080i footage from 2011 in 4K
th-cam.com/video/bf4iwQQUs2k/w-d-xo.html
My OG camcorders were jvc eveio hdd cams!
Sanyo had a line called Xacti. Those were a pistol like cameras who recorded H264 into an MP4 container on SD cards and some models like the HD1000 recorded full HD at 1080i.
In 2009 I bought Sanyo Xacti VPC HD2000. It was the first consumer camera in the world capable of 1920x1080 @ 60P. And I was amazed by it.
I have been a licensed private investigator since 1995. I have used the following camcorder formats: Sony 8 mm, Sony 8 Hi mm, Sony Digital 8 mm, JVC standard definition on SD card, JVC High definition on SD Card and Canon 720p on SD Card. The only camcorders that are not broken are the JVC standard definition, except for a burnout pixel and one of the several JVC High definition camcorders and my current Canon camcorder. The problem with the Sony camcorders is that they became obsolete and all of them broke. I really loved the Sony Digital 8 mm because of the various inputs and outputs. I was able to use it as a web cam with various efforts. All of the JVC camcorders (except for the standard definition) had the same problem, the pull out monitor would go black.
I really like all these camcorders in some way. Good work on this video, Everything was explained very well, and this video had very good information all while being very entertaining. Good Job Vwestlife!
Yep my Sony HDV Handycam still takes great video and I use a Sony GV-HD700 Video Walkman to edit and playback. It looks great. I also have a Grass Valley HDMI in to Firewire out box that allows me to record any modern video onto HDV.
Wow.... The hours and hours checking out all kinds of camcorders and tech reviews spouting off buy now and save...save ..save money $$$ lol Yes ~ Smartphone ! 😉🤑👽
In 2008 I had the Nokia N85 which recorded video in VGA quality at 30fps. It actually had a 5 MP rear camera and a flash. The iPhone 3G came out the same year and while it did not come with the ability to record video, it was possible to get apps that recorded video via the newly introduced Apple App Store.
I love the old clips. I'd watch a stream of random people's old camcorder footage and I'm sure I'm not alone.
I stopped with camcorders at the Hi-8 format. Still have a bunch of tapes and the combo VHS/Hi-8 VCR to play them. My daughters will drag them out when they're feeling nostalgic.
Great video and I like the collection of "handycams" (using a brand name as a generic label, a la Scotch Tape or Kleenex) that you have.
Thanks for sharing.
When you showed an HDV footage, my cheap LG Full HD LED TV experienced a second life that didn't expect to see.
Same here! On my kinda Old Philips Full HD LED TV, 43 in size i think. Crazy good picture right There. Looked like 4K. ANOTHER crazy thing is, that really Low quality movie rips like 640x480 looks kind of Ok on this tv (When played from Apple TV with VLC).
My first real camcorder was the DV4500 toy camera by aiptek. I shot all of my oldest TH-cam videos with it. Bought it online from best buy back in the mid 2000s. Recorded MPEG4. ASF video files onto sd memory cards. Worked great for the time. Wasn't until 2013 when I got my first android phone with a decent camcorder on it. Wasn't HD but it shot better video than my Aiptek.
Whew, the dark ages of "too many choices, none of them really right for me!" camcorders; Everything from potato camera to prosumer models. I used to get so angry at misleading/useless features from the more expensive ones, and frustrated with the build quality (yet surprising image quality) out of flippers that stopped working for no reason at all. Between 2008-2012 I had good luck with some of the mid-grade point and shoot still cameras that had video recording to SD card and that was the stop-gap solution that worked for me right up until a few years ago when phones finally got good enough to take over. SLR cameras were always a bit more quality than I needed.. once the camera body, required lenses, batteries etc totaled up.
Nikon Cool Pix "Red" waterproof was one of the ones I stuck with the longest. For $99 it absolutely couldn't be beat.
I honestly wonder what camera you are using, because from time to time it doesn’t look much better than those old Camcorders - which adds to the charm of your videos.
I used Canon FS200 like the one you showed, it has good stereo audio and optical zoom, far better than modern phones do.
Mine still works but its starting to show its hours, every seam is coming apart etc.. but thats because i've used it hardmounted to extremely vibrating surfaces lol
I remember walking into a Circuit city in 1995 and seeing a Sony display with their camcorders feeding TV's connected to each of the cams. It was the first time I saw a MiniDV video camera and I was blown away by the quality of the picture it was producing. That camera was a Sony VX1000 and the granddaddy of all subsequent DV cameras; including Sony's own industrial/professional lineup that would soon come out with the PD-150 that had XLR inputs and features for broadcasters and professionals, but in the same basic layout and body style. I later would use the PD-170 while working at a local TV station in the mid 2000s.
The first "real" video work I did was on a VX1000, and we soon upgraded to a VX2000. I shot a lot on that in the early days of video on websites, about 20 years ago. Eventually I moved jobs and didn't do a lot of video, but I got back into it when our graphics guys were having a clearout and handed me a barely-used Sony PD150, which is the "pro" version of the VX2000 with proper XLR inputs.
I love shooting with the PD150. I haven't done anything on it for months, but it's getting into winter so there's some lovely "magic hour" light these days.
Those boys at the end are a bit zesty
It really sucks that smartphones killed midrange camcorders. I just don't want to use my iPhone for TH-cam videos; the audio quality and of course zoom is nowhere near as good as a dedicated camera. I'm still using my Panasonic HC-V770 I bought in 2018 because there's really nothing to replace it with.
Personally, I believe if you want to get into video, you should start with the most basic model with the least number of advanced features, but while also being reasonably decent quality.
Nothing will teach good skills like having a basic camera. You should hone your skill before getting a new and powerful one.
There are a lot of aspects of photography or videography that are just as important to any camera you use, no matter how advanced or basic that camera may be. Getting all the basics down before jumping to a "better" platform will serve you well. Also, don't forget audio. It is trivially easy to do audio wrong.
There are billions, if not trillions of hours of BAD video footage on everything from 8mm film to the latest HD youtube video spread around the world. Most of those have awful audio to boot. Get down the basics. Make a low res film (or even B&W)( with good audio first.
You can hand people the best gear ever made costing millions of dollars and most people will still make a bad video. If you can make a good video with low end old gear, just imagine what you will be able to do once you get good gear. You'll use it right.
....new word from VWestlife ... POPALAR!
The HDV footage is actually super impressive. I can’t believe magnetic tape is capable of this!
In terms of importing the video from these old formats, I can only speak to MiniDV and HDV, but back I when I dealt with those formats, I preferred the free utility WinDV to Windows Movie Maker, because it would automatically split the video tape into separate files based on the time/date data in the feed. When I had a single AVI file that had already been imported by WMM, I would use the free utility dvdate to split it up. And finally, I preferred HDVSplit for importing HDV over WMM, as WMM imports a tape as, again, a single massive file, but also as a .dvr-ms file, which I could never figure out how to use with anything else, while HDVSplit imports each clip as its own .m2t file, which is the MPEG-2 transport stream format, that a lot more programs can deal with.
In 2023, I continue to use a Panasonic HC-V520 camcorder (with its 60X optical zoom) bought in 2013. Even though many of my phones exceed its video specs, it offers many technical benefits and conveniences. There's much to be said to for "play it as it lays". If you're a maniac like me and read all the credits in documentaries, you may have noticed that the Panasonic HC-V520 camcorder is often listed as a B-roll camera used for various pickup shots for documentaries produced from 2013 to 202+. It's easy to understand why. Not great, but certainly good enough (when set to progressive 60fps).
Scored a Panasonic 4K Camcorder for $250 used recently. Its honestly an amazing camera which has all the usual camcorder quirks (night vision, huge zoom range, great IS, External mic options etc) But it shoots in 4K so it gives you a really sharp image but still retains that camcorder "look" which is great for shooting more nostalgic esque videos.
One thing I'm not nostalgic for are Sony's proprietary formats, like the memory stick.
I still have 2 perfectly working Sony HDV camcorders, One with a 1 inch sensor and interchangeable lenses and another smaller HDR-HC1 (I think I have that model correct - The other I dont remember) I shot a documentary on a Musician in 2012 with a rigged out Canon 7d DSLR and used the HDV camcorders as b-roll cams. After grading it was hard to tell the difference between the HDV and the DSLR except for the cinematic DOF on tighter shots with the 7D of course. Besides deinterlacing and 1080i, at 24fps (some 3/2 pulldown trickery inside the camera) the HDV even with smaller sensors had better dynamic range and more pleasing colour science than the DSLR. HDV could also record 720p 'progressive too. HDV was a marvel for its time and I was fascinated at the quality recorded to tape. Thanks for getting into HDV instead of concentrating on the SD formats and presenting them in the correct format for us to enjoy here.
I first had a Panasonic VHS C camcorder that my uncle lended to me and used for birthdays and other parties. Then in 2002, I bought a Sony miniDV camcorder for my uncle’s wedding, which became my favorite camcorder, it had better resolution, more recording time, amazing optical zoom, long battery life! And easy to connect to the computer via FireWire, and made video copies to DVDs! I wish Sony would make a newer model of their Handycam, because I’m not a fan of action cameras like GoPro since they’re too small in lens and zoom!
You can still connect Firewire devices to a current Mac Studio M1 Ultra - I have a USB-C Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt 1 dongle, then a Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt dongle, and then a Firewire 800 to 4-Pin Firewire i-Link Cable. I can connect either my Sony DV-D200E Digital8/Hi8/Video8 Walkman or my Sony DCR-PC6E DV Handycam and they all still work with iMovie on the latest MacOS Sonoma 14.1
The other nice thing about the DV-D200E is that, as you flagged before, it acts as a great video capture device, so I can also link up any composite video & stereo audio connection in from my Philips VHS VCR or my Sony SL-F1UB Betamax and they will also link through the Firewire into iMovie too :)
I thought Macs with the M1 and newer CPUs don't work with DV anymore -- or at least not through iMovie.
Geez, seeing what has been done to the Minolta brand almost made me cry.
I think I almost got that Sony DCR-HC51e back in 2009 but it was a little over my budget. LOVED that model a lot and sound wise it really had one heck of a Mic inside. I opted for the Samsung VP-D381 instead which i kinda regret. Since the camera recorded DV tapes with the same low-magnetic intensity in SP mode as it does in LP mode. Took me a few years to realize that though..... The first tape i recorded on it was not properly pre-magnetized. I had pre-recorded my other tapes 3 times before actually recording on them, to make sure the tapes magnetic properties would be more optimal for recording. And lo and behold... that actually helped. The recordings i did with the Samsung VP-D381 on these pre-magnetized tapes actually survived. The recordings on my very first tape without pre-recording/magnetiziatuon, is not playable anymore and just gives me glitches. it seems Samsung went wayyyy off the DV specs with their Mini DV camcorders. Which is why i wish i had bought a Sony model instead. I also remember the first SD card camcorders. I think they recorded MPEG2 files, before H264 really became mainstream on these. Same with these HDD camcorders. I think Canon's HDD variations of the HDV and SD card cameras, recorded MPEG2 Transportstream files. HDV was great and i always preferred Canon's HDV format over Sony's. Over here in Germany you could not really get new Digital8, Hi8 or VHS-C camcorders anymore in stores. Not even on clearance. You COULD however still get the tapes for it. Digital and Hi8 tapes were available wayy into the late 2010s over here.
LoL. That Kodak camera in 0:40. My parents had (and they still have it) exactly the same back in the day. I should probably get out the batteries and check if it's still working when I would have some free time. It also probably has better optics than most cameras in modern phones, because that's something you cannot reasonably miniaturize.
I had (or had used) a few of these types. My first one was a Sony Hi8 back in 96(?) and I believe it overall had the best picture quality of all. Had a Canon MiniDV and was never impressed with the quality, the artifacts were quite apparent in any kind of motion. Then had JVC everio with SD / internal memory which was absolute rubbish. I never bought into the DVD recorder ones although they were kind of popular here.