A camcorder is a portable electronic device (generally a digital camera) for recording video images and audio onto a storage device. The camcorder contains both camera and recorder in one unit, hence its portmanteau name. This compares to previous technology where they would be separate.
Analog vs. digital
Camcorders are often classified by their storage device: VHS, Betamax, Video8 are examples of older, videotape-based camcorders which record video in analog form. Newer camcorders include Digital8, miniDV, DVD, Harddrive and solid-state (flash) semiconductor memory, which all record video in digital form. The imager-chip is considered an analog component, so the digital namesake is in reference to the camcorder's processing and recording of the video. Analog tapes lose quality slowly over time, "snow" becomes visible, while this does not happen with digital tapes.
Digital
Digital Tapeless: Low-end digital tapeless systems often use an MPEG-4 codec and flash memory; extremely high-end versions, on the other hand, store uncompressed or DV-coded data to hard disk
DV codec based:
* MiniDV and several derivatives, including DVCPRO from Panasonic and DVCAM from Sony. DV records the highest quality pictures on DV tapes that are easily transferable via Firewire or USB to personal computers.
* Digital8, that uses Hi8 tapes (Sony is the only company currently producing D8 camcorders though Hitachi used to). The importance of the high quality Digital 8 format is its backward compatibility with Hi8.
MPEG-2 codec based:
* MICROMV: Uses a matchbox-sized cassette. Sony was the only electronics manufacturer for this format.
* DVD (with the biggest market increases): Mini DVD-R and DVD-RAM. This is a multi-manufacturer standard that uses 8 cm DVD discs for 30 minutes of video. DVD-R can be played on consumer DVD players but cannot be added to or recorded over once finalized for viewing. DVD-RAM can be added to and/or recorded over, but cannot be played on many consumer DVD players. The DVD-RW is another option allowing the user to re-record, but costs much more per disc.
New Formats:
* HDV: Records up to an hour of HDTV MPEG-2 signal roughly equal to broadcast quality HD on a standard MiniDV cassette.