200cm3 HDTV Camcorder to Dominate Market?

Many people in the industry have said that digital camera video is just sort of a freebie that enables the shooting of SDTV imagery. But finally resolution has reached high-definition television (HDTV) levels. In February 2006, Sanyo Electric Co Ltd of Japan announced its DMX-HD1 digital camera, capable of shooting 720p HDTV video and still images with 5.04 million pixels (Fig 1).

Until now there have only been three consumer camcorders capable of shooting HDTV video, and Sanyo is clearly determined to grab itself a share of the market in the initial stages, while it is still developing. The major sales point is the small volume of the product, only 200cm3. This is about half the volume of the HDR-HC1 manufactured by Sony Corp of Japan, the competing compact HDTV-capable camcorder that is proving such a hit.

While the new design is ultra-compact, the specs of the optical system are on a par with those of a standard camcorder.

Another interesting point is that the viewfinder uses an active matrix organic electroluminescent (EL) display panel. Because it is self-emitting it neatly avoids some key problems faced by existing liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, such as response delay and a narrow viewing angle.

While panel life had been feared to be too short, the firm has assured 20,000 hours, which is significantly higher than the 10,000-hour threshold generally used as a guideline for volume production in mobile gear applications. The extended service life was accomplished by creating white subpixels to joint the exiting red, green and blue ones, cutting power consumption.

Can it Escape Niche?

Even so, it seems unlikely that the new product will have any immediate effect on existing camcorder manufacturers. One of the reasons is the short recording time, due to Sanyo's decision to emphasize the small size and use a memory card as the storage media. A single 2-Gbyte SD memory card can only hold a maximum of 43 minutes of 720p video imagery. For common usage, such as at school athletic events, admission ceremonies and the like, the same one-hour storage medium as today's tape-based systems offer would be preferable.

Another problem is that the systems are not yet in place to play back recorded HDTV imagery. HDTV video files can be stored on personal computers (PC), but in most cases they will have to be transferred to an SD memory card and then played back from the camera to view. This is because only the latest high-performance PCs can avoid dropping frames in decoding. The same procedure is required to play back imagery stored to a digital videodisc (DVD) recorder, because existing models cannot decode 720p Moving Picture Coding Experts Group Phase 4 (MPEG-4) files. Sanyo Electric recognizes the problems with viewing, and commented that it is working out how to best resolve them in the next-generation model.

This problem will likely be resolved by adopting an integrated circuit (IC) supporting H.264 encoding and decoding in the successor to the DMX-HD1. And as one engineer at a camera manufacturer pointed out, "One semiconductor manufacturer is already ramping up for volume production of the chip for HDTV-capable camcorders, in 2008."
Once the maturity of the Codec IC is known, other manufacturers will no doubt move ahead with their own plans for memory card-based HDTV cameras. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, for example, is one such company. It is even possible that the camcorder manufacturer might develop an H.264 Codec IC before a semiconductor manufacturer gets to it. Victor Co of Japan and other firms are developing HDTV-capable camcorders using 1.8-inch hard disks. It seems that HDTV camcorders will be offering a range of competing recording media for some time to come yet, including Sony's mini-DV tape.

Source: http://neasia.nikkeibp.com