Camcorders

Camcorders on this shelf span three recording methods that overlapped in the catalog years: tape, a small hard drive, and flash memory. The body shape stayed a pistol grip with a flip screen.

Tape (MiniDV and a few remaining 8mm decks) keeps a picture you can hold and wears the heads. Hard-drive camcorders filled an internal disk and then stopped. Flash models record to a card and survive a drop better than a spinning disk. The microphone is on the body, so handling noise and wind show up louder than the subject. An external mic jack, when the model has one, is the fix. A camcorder that will not talk to a current computer usually needs the original USB mode or a tape deck. The file is not gone. The cable handshake is.