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...

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

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.

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.

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.