Digital Camcorders

Digital camcorders generally offer very good to excellent picture quality, along with very good sound capability, compactness, and ease of handling. Making copies of digital recording won't result in a loss of picture or sound quality. Analog camcorders can offer good quality sound and picture and are less expensive. But digital camcorder replaced analog camcorder completely. Canon XL2 is the best standard definition camcorder.

HD Camcorder

The high-definition (HD) video standard has been developed as the successor to the analog, standard definition (SD) video, which (in the United States) dates back to the first proposal by the National Television System Committee (NTSC) in 1941.

Even though the ATSC standard supports eight-teen different formats, we are restricting our discussion here to the ones that provide the most improvement in picture quality over NTSC. The two best known HD formats are 1080i (1920 x 1080, 60 fields per second interlaced) and 720p (1280 X 720, 60 frames per second progressive), compared with 480i for SD. In 2003 JVC introduced the first affordable camcorder with 720 lines of resolution.

Because most traditional store-and-forward HD-quality streaming systems use elaborate buffering techniques that introduce significant latencies, there techniques and algorithms are not well suited for real-time environments. Three of the main design parameters for HD live streaming are: (1) the video quality (mostly determined by the resolution of each video frame, the number of bits allocated for each of the three transmitted colors, the number of frames per second, and the compression technique used); (2) the transmission bandwidth; and (3) the end-to-end delay. Due to the massive amount of data required to transmit such streams simultaneously achieving low latency and keeping the bandwidth low are contradictory requirements. Packet losses and transmission errors are other problems in streaming HD live video. Because errors in one video frame may propagate to subsequent frames when certain compression algorithms are used,, small transmission errors may result in significant picture quality degradation over a period of time. Also, many live streaming systems do not recover packet losses in order to reduce end-to-end delay.

Best HD Camcorders

Sony HDR-SR12 120GB High Definition Handycam® Camcorder, Canon XL H1S, Canon XL H1A, Hitachi DZBX35A DVD Camcorder, Samsung VP-HMX10A and panasonic HDC-HS100