POINT OF VIEW

People end up piling unwatched cassettes simply because it takes time and effort to find the right one. With a DVD camcorder, you can just pop the disc into the DVD player. Besides, the dream of editing all the tapes into watchable highlight reels remains a dream because it is not very convenient t o transfer from tape to PC, then burn it to a DVD and yet retain 100 per cent picture quality.

A tapeless camcorder might seem tempting given that rewinding and fast forwarding is much easier on a disc than on a tape. But there are several reasons you should resist this temptation: capacity and cost are two of them.

The mini discs in DVD camcorders can only hold 15 minutes of video and cost Rs 75-100. The new dual layer disks hold up to 27 minutes of video and cost Rs 200 each, while the Mini DV tapes also at Rs 200 a piece hold 60-90 minutes of video. So the DVDs turn out very expensive on a per hour basis.

The hard drive and memory card camcorders have their own problems. Once the drive or card is full, the camcorder is useless till you empty it, especially the one with hard disk. You can buy memory cards from any place, but how many can you carry?

Then there is the picture quality. Mini DV camcorders are so good that they8217;re occasionally used for TV broadcasts, even movies.

Most tapeless camcorders store video in a variation of MPEG-2 format. It seems crude when compared to a Mini DV and not a lot of editing programs recognise the format, so you will need to run your recording through a converter first. But things are changing. Last year, Sony and Panasonic adapted a new format, AVCHD, for tapeless camcorders. On perfect setting, the AVCHD picture is great, but its editing requires a monster of a computer.

In theory, tapeless camcorders are ideal for editing software, but when you do it they hold nothing more than a bunch of computer files. You can copy them to your PC in seconds rather than play at real-time speed from the camcorder to PC. So if you want to e-mail videos8212;files sizes will be huge, but broadband prices are falling and high speeds are available at home8212;they are a good option.

They also appear attractive as you can store all your videos on a hard disk, particularly with bigger ones available at low prices. But hard disks are usually the first to fail in a computer, and to avoid this you end up burning DVDs. And who knows how long they last.

Which brings us to the reason you want a camcorder. Some people hope their kids will watch the movies when older, others keep them for sharing videos. As the popularity of cameraphone video shows, often people don8217;t care about quality and longevity. So tapeless camcorders8217; problems seem irrelevant.

For others, Mini DV8217;s advantages should be kept in mind: storage, price, capacity, quality, editing ability and archive. The death of tape may be inevitable, but it shouldn8217;t happen till there is a superior replacement.

Gagandeep S. Sapra is the Chairman and CEO of System3 group of companies. gagandeepsystem3group.com