southerndownhill.com - Forum

I was looking at getting a mini dv camcorder and a man in a currys digital shop said that they were becoming obsolete?

this may just be sales of them are tailing off as people who are just using them for holiday snap type purposes want conveneancy that hard drive or sd cards provide. I will be using it for bikey things and dont mind putting effort in to getting good quality results.

The general consensus seems to be mini dv has the best quality and id rather record to the best i can but it wont be worth it if i cant buy the wee tapes.

Anybody know anymore?

i think they are becoming less common but not obsolete. there are alternatives which are more convinient to use but for many people who want a good quality result, for editing perposes etc mini dv will be around for a while yet...

Alex Rankin, Clay Porter, the Focus boys and I all use them for filmmaking.  A lot of the top end high def cameras still record onto mini dv, so no I dont think so!

Thanks guys. When i heard this i was a tad surprised.

I'm still using Mini DV for filming (Canon XM1).

In my opinion and loads of people I know that are into video things,

MiniDV is on shakey ground.

The fact is all the decent pro quality camcorders still use Mini DV, DV or both.

So its still gonna have that market for a while, for people who work with video as a job, record to tape, work from it - then archive it.

But for younger people like us lot, the "youtube generation" who want things quick and fast, and are seduced by new standards like Hidefinition.

Equipment like sanyo's range of Xacti's which are really affordable, record in upto 1080 resolution!!!

And give you convenient drag & drop editing functions, it just seems the wise choice compared to spending hours "capturing" enormous amounts of uncompressed (yet often low quality) video data from tape.

Ive seen hard-drive cartridges used in professional industry camera's before. Think they were panasonics.

And with both Hard drive and solid state memory getting larger and cheaper everday, its gonna creep in across the board.

Probably what the guy meant was its become less people in the lower end of the market. When solid state hard discs can replace magnetic hard discs with reasonable price and capacity that won't help it. Does HDV use the same tapes as Mini DV?
If not then there won't be much need for mini DV.
That won't be for a few years yet tho.

I'm not saying tape will become obsolete in the high end market tho.

So what he said is based on truth but contains a bit of exaggeration and scaremongering.
Everything's becoming obsolete, its just a matter of time.
I'm always amused by products that are 'future proof'.  :D

You can record HDV onto a MiniDV tape.

An hour costs you £2.50.

Tapes last for years and provide a cheap and convenient archiving system.

Tape will be around for at least another 5 years.

^ AT LEAST - id be well suprised if they went before the next 10

I guarantee you that you will not be able to buy a camera that shoots on tape in a decades time.

Sony, Canon and Panasonic have all ceased development on tape-based systems and all have relatively recently released prosumer cameras that shoot on solid state media. XD-Cam HD is taking over the pro level side of things and cameras like the Red are going to speed up the change to solid state/hard-drive recorded HD.

5 years from now will probably see two new products/ranges in most manufactures lines, so tape will probably be around for that long, but in ten years time tape will be gone for good.

I was trying to get across that point too,

for archiving, DV cant be beat.

Hard drives and Flash memory in my experience ALWAYS become corrupted after leaving them alone for a few months. CDR doesnt last too long either.