Zoom In, Zoom Out

by Karen Director
May 1998

Panasonic to Discontinue Full-size Camcorders
Matsushita, the parent corporation of Panasonic, plans to discontinue production of the company's VHS and S-VHS camcorders by the middle of this year. According to Bill Mannion, General Manager of the Panasonic Consumer Video Division, "Our full size camcorder models will continue to be available at retail for several months, but we will no longer be producing full size VHS for the consumer market (i.e. PV-700 series, PV-S770) after April, 1998."

Steve Abend, National Business Development Manager of Panasonic's Broadcast & Digital Systems Co. division, affirmed that they would continue to manufacture the AG series of full-size VHS and S-VHS camcorders for professional videographers.

Digital Copy Protection Consensus Nears
The FireWire (IEEE 1394) digital interface may be a boon for consumer video producers but it's causing big headaches for major film studios and software makers. They fear that, without a copy protection system, consumers will use their DV camcorders, VCRs and computers to pirate video and software programs. Thus, we still await the introduction of a consumer DV editing VCR.

In February, a consortium of five consumer electronics and PC manufacturers made some progress on a copy protection system for digital video products. Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba Matsushita and Sony proposed that information transmitted by FireWire be "authenticated" and coded before being "accepted" by a device such as a VCR or computer.

A multi-industry task force, the Copyright Protection Technical Working Group, will choose the final standard from among three proposals.

Sustained Video Orbit
Castlewood Systems is close to bringing a removable hard drive to market which uses magnetoresistive (MR) head technology. The company was founded by Syed Iftikar, the founder of SyQuest Technology and co-founder of Seagate Technology, where he invented the first 5.25-inch hard drive.

Castlewood has created ORB, a removable media hard drive that uses 3.5-inch disks. Dubbed M-DVD (magnetic digital versatile disc), the disks will hold 2.16 gigabytes of data. Although other removable media, such as Iomega's Jaz 2 can hold 2GB, Castlewood's MR technology allows users to record 133 minutes of M-JPEG-compressed video at S-VHS resolution (400 horizontal lines). It can do this because of its fast data transfer rate--12.2 megabytes per second.

Castlewood will provide four versions of ORB: internal EIDE, external parallel port, internal SCSI and external SCSI. Various configurations are compatible with different operating systems, including DOS, Windows 3.X/95/NT and Macintosh. Retail packages, including one disk, have a suggested retail price of $199.95; single ORBit disks list for $29.95 each. Sanyo and Thomson Consumer Electronics are among the manufacturers developing digital VCRs for use with ORBit disks.

XL1 Picture Quality
After some users who received early shipments of XL1 DV camcorders discovered a pattern of vertical lines on recorded images, Canon's Video Division worked overtime to investigate and correct the problem. Videomaker tested a pre-production model of the XL1 (Benchmarks, March 1998) in which the problem did not appear. Here is Canon's official statement about the picture quality problem:

Canon's research and development center has investigated this issue and has determined that the vertical lines are caused by noise interference generated by internal components of the XL1 camcorder. The amount of noise depends on the camcorder's settings, lighting conditions and the content of the image being recorded.

Since Canon remains committed to providing the highest level of customer satisfaction, if any current XL1 owners have these vertical lines and find the amount of noise objectionable--Canon will correct the situation.

It is important to note that the same corrective measure, which consists of the addition of a noise reduction component, is now being implemented on the XL1 production line. All future shipments of the XL1 camcorders to the marketplace will have the noise reduction component added.

XL1 owners who purchased units prior to the corrective action can have the noise reduction component installed at no cost. Contact Canon at (800) 828-4040 or send e-mail to video_tech_support@cusa.canon.com Video Division
Canon U.S.A., Inc.

MXplanation
Videonics product manager Steve Siacotos announced that the MXPro's introduction has been postponed until the second quarter of 1998. During "alpha testing" (initial troubleshooting) the company discovered that the MXPro would not meet Videonics' quality specifications in time for its announced end-of-1997 shipment date. DV upgrade information will be announced after the MXPro begins shipping.

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