No matter what store you go to today, be it an electronics store, a phone service store, or even a grocery store, you will see a lot of digital devices around you, including digital cameras, digital music players, even laundry machines in your local neighbourhood laundromat have digital controls.
History of Digital Video
The ability to record your own videos has been around for several decades. Affordable film movie cameras have been on the market since the 1950s, and video camcorders that record directly on tape have entered the marketplace in the late 70s and early 80s. While the technology that these devices brought with them was truly revolutionary, the issue was that you couldn’t do much with the video you would record with an analog camcorder. You could show it to your friends and family in its unedited form, but there was nothing other than that.
Digital video first appeared on the market in the middle of the 1990s. Both Sony and Panasonic introduced the first digital camcorders for consumers in 1995. In the same year, Apple started selling devices with FireWire interface. The interface made it possible to connect digital camcorders to computers, transfer and edit video.
Advantages of Digital Video
Digital camcorders have two big advantages over analog camcorders. The first advantage is that the quality of the recording is better. If you used a high-quality tape camcorder in the past, the quality of a digital camera may not be significantly better, but it will be better. The second big advantage of digital video is that you can edit digital video on your computer after you are done shooting it. Both PCs and Macs can do amazing things with video. You can shoot something, import it into your computer within seconds, cut out the fragments that you don’t like, add all kinds of special effects, and then instantly send your movie to your friends and family over the Internet. This functionality allows you to do at home what a few decades ago was only available to broadcast and movie professionals with access to tens of thousands of dollars of equipment.
If you buy a digital camcorder today, most likely it will be a digital device. If your computer is less than five years old, chances are very good that it will be able to edit the video from your camcorder well.