Yes that is a really cheesey pun based on a famous line from “Hamlet”, but it is very relevant to this article and a really good question when it comes to buying a camcorder. Ever since HDTV first came out we’ve seen massive adoption of the technology into peoples homes in the form of PlayStation 3, HD DVD players, BluRay players HD cable boxes and Home Theatre PCs. The technology really has gone leaps and bounds to get where it is today. mostly because of the steep price drop of HD LCD panels in 2006/2007 which have made them popular and a standard for a new TV not only for image quality but the size advantage too.
However, storing and creating your own memories and media in HD is a real technology gap at the moment and definatly not mainstream … yet. For example if you shoot a video clip with a standard digital camcorder you could fill a DVD with 2 hours of video, given that a dvd is 4 gigabytes of data. DVD resolution is 480p which means there are 480 horizontal lines progressivly on the screen at any one time to build the image, HD resolution is 1080p so there are 1080 lines of data on the screen at the same time. So if you have twice the amount of lines they’ll need to be twice as long to maintain the correct aspect ratio of the image. Which means HD will need four times the amount of data as DVD quality. So now your 2 hours of film in HD will require 16GB of space not 4GB.
So what does this mean to you? Read the rest of this entry »
