At Last, Hard Drive Camcorders

I’ve been wondering how long it would take for this to happen. JVC has introduced the Everio line of camcorders, which include a 20 GB or 30 GB 1.8-inch hard drive (like those found in iPods). Footage is saved directly to the hard drive instead of to MiniDV tape: <a title="
JVC Introduces Four Hard Drive-Based Everio Camcorders – Camcorderinfo.com” href=”http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/JVC-Introduces-Four-Hard-Drive-Based-Everio-Camcorders.htm”&gt;
JVC Introduces Four Hard Drive-Based Everio Camcorders – Camcorderinfo.com.

The downside is that the video is compressed using MPEG-2 compression, the same that’s used on DVDs, so you’re not getting pristine, uncompressed DV video. I can’t tell yet whether you’d be able to use them with iMovie; from the article it sounds as if you need special Mac software to get it off the camera. Perhaps a future version of iMovie could encode the MPEG-2 video into AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec), which is what iMovie does with HDV footage.

Still, this is a good step forward. The Everio line will be available in August, and range in price from $800 to $1,000.

Published by Jeff Carlson

Author, photographer, and late-nighter Jeff Carlson writes for outlets such as Popular Photography, DPReview, Creative Pro, and others, and is a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Take Control of Your Digital Photos; The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Apple Watch, and Take Control of Your Digital Storage, among many other titles. View all posts by Jeff Carlson