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Digital Camcorder Sales Rise as Category Sales Slip
Sales of camcorders continue to shift toward digital models that offer clear images, dual motion and still image recording capability and compact body designs. Despite the innovations, category sales reached a peak in annual sales volume in recent years, and sales are expected to drop another 13 percent to 4.5 million units in 2006. Overall category sales dipped 5.5 percent to 5.2 million units in 2005. The impact of new digital still cameras with the ability to record short video sequences on flash memory cards has given consumers new options to consider when looking to make home movies, and this is expected to escalate in 2006. This year, CEA predicts the average price of a camcorder will decline from $305 to $300. This will drive factory revenue down 13 percent to $1.46 billion, CEA estimates. While overall unit volume is in decline, the internal dynamics of the market are shifting. According to CEA, almost 80 percent of all camcorders sold in 2005 were digital. A new trend to emerge in 2005 was the development of digital camcorders that record video and still images to removable mini-hard disc drives. These new models eventually may replace tape-based formats as prices on hard-drive and flash memory media are reduced further. In 2006, one manufacturer introduced a flash memory based camcorder that could store up to 20 minutes of video in high-definition 720p resolution. Additionally, camcorder manufacturers are trying to keep stride with the megapixel (digital still pictures over one million total pixels of resolution) designs of digital still cameras. In 2006 some camcorder models offered still image capture with image resolution as high as four megapixels. What’s more, advanced digital camcorder models continued to include the ability to connect wirelessly to the Internet without a PC in order to send digital photos, or to download e-mail and news services for reading on the unit’s LCD screen. Higher-end digital camcorders also are improving the quality of the optics used in their lens designs to further sharpen digital still photos and videos. With the decline in prices for digital formats, the old analog models that dominated sales a short time ago virtually have disappeared from manufacturer line-ups in 2006. MiniDV Sales Impacted by New Digital FormatsStrong sales of recordable DVD-based camcorders and the emergence of hard-drive and flash memory based units have begun to compress the line-ups of models based on the MiniDV digital tape format. As prices descended below $300, manufacturers began devoting more attention to new models offering better performance and higher margins. Many Mini DV camcorders now offer flash memory card slots for storage of digital still shots, enabling the camcorder to do double duty, shooting videos and photos. These memory cards offer greater bandwidth than DV or D8 format tapes, which is necessary for storing megapixel snapshots. Most digital models offer LCD view screens and stereo sound recording. Mini-DV camcorders store video images with a 5:1 digital compression scheme. DVD Camcorders Continue To GrowAs with video recording decks, an increasingly popular trend in camcorder design is to employ optical disc recording media instead of tape. Among the chief advantages of optical discs over tape is instant random access to different scenes and chapters on the disc without having to wait to fast forward or rewind to the appropriate entry points on a tape. This feature makes editing home videos a much easier process and allows for fast instant replays in the field. Additionally, depending on the format use, DVDs recorded in a camcorder can be dropped into a DVD player without the need to hook up a camcorder to playback images. According to market surveys going into the 2005 holiday selling season, DVD-based camcorders accounted for 22 percent of all camcorder sales, with significant growth expected in the year ahead. Several companies have introduced camcorders using various optical disc formats. Hitachi, which has marketed camcorders using the DVD-RAM/DVD-R format for the last four years, opted in 2002 to drop tape-based camcorders entirely in favor of systems employing the smaller 8-cm disc formats. Panasonic also added a DVD-RAM/-R camcorder to its line, while Sony aggressively promoted camcorders based on the DVD-RW/-R disc formats. These camcorders use an 8-cm version of the 4.8-inch DVD discs. The media comes in a protective caddy that prevents damage in handling. A new feature to surface in the DVD camcorder category in 2006 was the use of three-chip imagers capable of delivering broadcast-quality color and resolution levels. Three-chip imagers have been growing in popularity in high-end mini-DV models, and will likely continue to grow in the DVD camcorder segment. High-definition Camcorders Continue To Advance High-definition also is heading toward hard-drive and Flash memory based video recorders. One such model introduced in 2006 would record as much as 20 minutes of 720p high-definition video on a 1-GB flash card. Some industry experts have predicted that the first hard-disc drive-based high-definitions soon will arrive at prices starting under $1,000. JVC Continues To Pioneer HD Camcorder DesignsIn January 2003 JVC introduced the future of consumer digital camcorders when it unveiled a consumer model based on the Mini DV tape format that will record both standard definition and HD 720p high-definition videos. The unit, which has been replaced with a newer version for 2006, records in the native 720p at 30fps, 480p at 60fps, and 480i formats. For playback, images can be converted and output at the 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480i levels. In addition it produces digital still shots at 640x480, 848x480 and 1280x960 resolution. HD Camcorder Standard Arrives In July, 2003, four Japanese CE companies – Canon, JVC, Sharp and Sony – developed specifications for an HD camcorder format for the recording and playback of HD video on DV cassettes. It is based in part the earlier JVC design and was dubbed "HDV". Specifications Offer Options The HDV format includes the 720p/30 frames per second (fps) system that JVC uses in its original HD camcorder and adds to that a 1080i spec at a variety of frame rates. The companies said that adopting both 1080i and 720p would enable the development of products conforming to the global high-definition infrastructure. HDV products will not be required to support both 720p and 1080i. Resolution for 720p is 1280x720 and for 1080i is 1440x1080, with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The frame rates for each are: 720p (60, 30, 50, and 25) and 1080i (60 and 50). The HDV format specifies data recording of MPEG-2 compressed HD signals based on the DV format. Audio signals are digitized with 48kHz/16-bit quantization sampling. Sony Builds High-definition Camcorder AssortmentSony, a dominant market share leader in the camcorder category, introduced the world's first 1080i HD consumer camcorder for the 2004-2005 selling year. The model supports the HDV tape format, which uses MPEG-2 compression to record and play HD on DV cassettes. A second generation model that was more compact was introduced in 2006 at a $2,000 retail price. Sony’s HD models record and play back HD video with 1440x1080 resolution using HDV's 1080/60i spec (60 fields per second, two fields create a frame in interlaced). A second generation model will appear in 2006. Hard Disc Drive Camcorders Arrive A new trend in camcorder development in 2005 was to replace tape- and DVD-based units with those that recorded to hard disc drives (HDDs) or flash memory chips. Manufacturers following this path note that music players have gone from tape to CD to hard drive, and feel that video is ripe to follow a similar course. The disadvantage to these approaches, at least in the early going, is the much higher cost of storage media compared with tapes or DVDs. Early HDD camcorders were based on MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-4 compression, which enables a 4-GB micro hard drive to store 60 minutes of video at 720x480 resolution levels.
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