# Digital video cameras **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 14, 2002, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/digital-video-cameras/103505 "2002-04-14T01:24:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![starfish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/87869e/32.png) [@starfish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/starfish)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2002, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/digital-video-cameras/103505/1 "2002-04-14T01:24:52Z")
My JVC digital video camera record on mini DV tapes. Why tape? It seems so analog. Why not something solid state? A mini CD-RW or an IBM mini disk? ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2002, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/digital-video-cameras/103505/2 "2002-04-14T01:54:13Z")
That little tape stores about 10GB, IIRC. That’s the same capacity of a double-sided DVD-RAM disk. CD-R is only 0.7 GB. There are some video cameras like [this](http://www.zdnetindia.com/reviews/specials/digitalworld/digicam/stories/50446.html) that use 8cm DVD-RAM disks, but those only hold about 2.8 GB. You sacrifice recording time and/or quality for convenience. (Nobody will deny that disks are more convenient than tapes) Tapes are pretty amazing things. A little cartridge can hold many square feet of surface area. Even with a simple, low-density data recording mechanism you can record a lot of data. And magnetic read/write heads are much simpler and cheaper than optical devices. Tapes are still used for data backups. Also on a camera (as with backups,) random-access capability is not very important. It’s not like a computer hard disk where you want to be able to access any piece of data instantly. You just record data sequentially. It makes more sense to use a simple tape to record the data, then when you get back, dump it onto a DVD disk or hard drive. ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2002, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/digital-video-cameras/103505/3 "2002-04-14T02:01:55Z")
> [@](#): > > Why tape? It seems so analog. But, yet, it’s digital. It’s a huge string of 1’s and 0’s. It’s as digital as you can get. It’s as digital as CD’s and/or solid-state memory. What’s the problem? ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2002, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/digital-video-cameras/103505/4 "2002-04-14T06:17:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by scr4 \* > That little tape stores about 10GB, IIRC. For DV, it’s about 13gb/hour for NTSC, 15.5gb/hour for PAL. > [@](#): > > It seems so analog There have been cameras that record to internal hard drives for quite a while now, but they’re generally extremely expensive and targeted towards professionals shooting HD format, not NTSC or PAL DV. Tape is cheap. A 20gb exchangable data unit in your camera would be very expensive (ok, at least it’d be much more expensive than tape, which is dirt cheap ) How many expensive exchangable hard drive packs ($100? More?) do you want to buy, vs. a $15 mini-DV tape?. Do you really want to pay $500(?) more for a ‘less analog’ camera that provides no increase in capability? At NAB 2001 there was a vendor who’d presented an external hard disk pack that would hook up to any DV camera and you would do a shoot while recording to the pack instead of to tape. Afterwards you’d plug the pack into your PC and it would appear as a hard disk loaded with .mov or .avi files. I’m darned if I can find vendor now, though – this may have been a scheme that didn’t flesh out. ---
**Author:** ![handy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5a626/32.png) [@handy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handy)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2002, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/digital-video-cameras/103505/5 "2002-04-14T16:12:05Z")
There is a dvd (or was it cd?) recordable digital video camera, I think, which records on dvds & if you want such a beast you have to pay the price, $1500+ Therefore, those cassettes make things quite a bit cheaper.but you do need to change them often.