Older doesnt necisarily mean badder.

King Goldfish

King Goldfish

I was checking out my old Toshiba camera i bought back in 1990. I may have posted a photo of it in the past. I'll try and take a photo of it and compare vid shots with my PV 120 3CC


I realized that the color and clarity on this thing is pretty damn nice. its better then the IR camera I have when the IR is in normal mode.

I did a spec check on it on the net and found a PDF file. I was surprized to see it had 520 lines of resolution. thats the same as both of my panasonics have that are 15 years newer. I guess all DV did was make editing easier and of course has the potentual of holding far greater lines of resolution on a tape 1/12 the size of a VHS. but unless you're willing to fork out more then 2500 bucks for a decent DV camera then I think this would be an awesome alternative for a film student to buy who is on a budget as opposed to buying a Video Camera under 300 bucks that may only have 400 lines of resolution.

520 is prettty damn good. and a decent VHS RCA capturing cable works just fine with Pinnacle. I think Pinnacle is free (watered down version) with its capturing device which I think now can be bought for under 50 bucks.

anyways the Toshiba I have I've seen on eBay for around 250 bucks. one was 150 bucks but had no case or battery recharger device.

I'll update with photos and video comparisons
 
Are you comparing VHS to Mini DV? A VHS tape only holds about 230 horizontal lines of resolution.
 
edited: Wow.. you learn something new everyday. Anyways, the camera claims to have a higher res then some of the cheaper vid cameras today. But i just realized they are Hi8 tapes not DV.


"of 240 lines, 3/4 inch SP at 325 lines, S-VHS and Hi8 at approximately 400 lines, Betacam SP and MII at close to 400 lines, and DVC at 500 lines (although some tests point to effective resolutions of around 400 lines). These values would suggest that S-VHS and Hi8 are as good as Betacam SP and MII, and decidedly better than 3/4 inch SP. This is not borne out when viewing images from these sources. Most people would agree that 3/4 inch SP looks better than S-VHS or Hi8 and that Betacam SP and MII look a lot better. So what's happening?"

Still the camera says 520 l.o.r while some of the hi8 and newer Video cams of today are as low as 240 lines from the spec sheets I read up. and you can clearly see the quality difference. So what if I could use this Older Camera and capture it into digital? is that possible with a digital recorder at 520 LOR? for 200 bucks thats not bad.
 
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Well the camera has 520 lines of pixels in the vertical direction as it has to fit the right spec :)

How much the camera can actually resolve though is different.

I'm not sure about going from your Hi8 cam to digital. You would have to bypass the in camera compression to do this and I'm not sure how easy that task would be,
 
Its amazing what DV does.. I been reading more up on it. But for the average person it really doesnt make much difference. sure they can upload it faster through a 1398 firewire link but other then that for the average person its only a step closer to burning home vids to DVD.

Im seriouslly wondering whats going to happen to DVDs in the next 10 years. Do you think that format wills till exists? I mean with the way things are changing now and all. Im guessing something much smaller like flashcards will replace DVD players and burners soon. Tiney postal stamp size chips you just pop in with say 50 gigs of data (or more) in the next 5-10 years. Why bother having a big bulky DVD when you can have a box of thousands of chip cartridges that hole 10 times as much data.

What do you think?
 
You certainly have a point Mr. Goldfish. I think many people can tell the difference between a decent 3chip camera and a single chip - whether VHS or DV. Now the difference becomes really noticable between VHS and progressive DV footage. There's absolutely no comparison there.

I really don't know where the markets going to go. HD seems to be the hit thing for companies this year (although I'm not sure it is with consumers yet...). I suspect the next step will be wide acceptance of HD DVDs (whether people can actually play them in HD or not). So I think the idea of an optical disk isn't going away anytime soon. The only problem with chips is that they are very easy to extract data from.
 
also Hard drives may come into play, with Digital recorders taking over DVD players or something... i am not sure on this one as i was told it.... but then how do u get the movies to the recorder???

i am thinking that the next thing to come will be HDDVD.... and it will be a lot smaller... cos everything new has to be smaller...
 
HD wont replace Disk because you cant store the movie when you replace it unless we get into a 100 terrabit system then its permanently stored but someone will always want to back it up on something.


even for editing a HD isnt practical for storage.
 
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