Going through my stuff over the weekend, deciding what to keep and what to garage sale. I came across my camcorder, which I haven’t used for years.
It’s a pretty nice Sony, probably 2000 era; I don’t remember the model #, but it garnered sweet reviews on Amazon in 2000-2001. Has night shot, built in lap, stereo sount. Um. Some other stuff.
I’ve played with cheap digital recorders, and while they may have x-hundred lines of resolution, a lot of them look like crap, anyway.
I don’t have any tapes that I need it to play…is it silly to keep it with fairly cheap digital recorders available? Or is there something to be said for tape, maybe in a little retro-cool way?
I consider a camcorder one of those things everyone should have “just in case you need to record something.” I don’t see anything particularly outdated about a Hi8, other than the fact that it won’t shoot HD width. (It shouldn’t be that hard to find tapes if necessary.)
Modern camcorders aren’t particularly expensive, so you’re not going to get much for it; I would keep it.
This is one of the questions that we can’t really answer, because there’s not a lot of point in keeping it but it’s not worth anything either so there’s not a lot of point in getting rid of it. As a prosumer format I preferred S-VHS because the tapes seemed a lot more durable. I supposed tape does have a specific “look” to it, but the image sensors were all solid state for consumer / prosumer stuff by the time Hi-8 came around so you don’t get the softer look of tube cameras. If HD (and size) wasn’t an issue I’d take a new 3-tube camera over a solid state sensor any day, they had a softer, more organic look to them.
Thanks to post-processing you can give your digital video any attributes you may feel may be missing (hue, saturation, contrast, grain, etc).
I have an old… Panasonic (?) Hi8 camcorder, and the videos from high-end Point and Shoot and DSLR’s blow it away. I’ve got no reason to hold on to it. And this is coming from someone who still uses a model M keyboard.
I keep my old Hi8 camcorder, and even bought a Digital8 one a couple of years ago. Why? To transfer my vast pile of 8mm, Hi8 and D8 tapes. And I keep it around in case of hard drive crash.
If its a Sony, you may want to google “Sony + X-ray”
Sony, for a brief period, had one model of their Hi-8’s with zero lux night vision tuned so that if you added a special filter to the lens, turned on the night vision mode during bright sunlight, the waves were such that it allowed you to see thru others clothing. Sony was forced to take it off the market. Force obvious reasons, its now a collectors item, worth its weight in gold.
PS I have one. I bought it by chance before all of this “came to light”. Of course I did not send mine back to Sony for a retrofit.
Heck if you are going to toss it, I’ll take it. I need to bump the tapes of the honeymoon/early kidlet over to digital, and can’t find all the parts to my Sony Hi8…
“Extra” cameras are always great, and I recently had a situation where a Hi-8 came in handy.
(Video of kids’ musical theatre. Couple stationary cameras, a couple people shooting close ups, edit the best shots together later. Sometimes, the hi-8 shots were the best shots, even though they weren’t high definition. Glad it was there.)