7 Reasons Your Next Camcorder Should Be DV

Ask someone using a DV camcorder why they chose DV over an analog format and you are likely to get an ear full. If you are looking for reasons to upgrade to DV, look no further. Here are a number of advantages that simply can't be ignored.

If you want the best image quality available in a consumer video format, DV is the only choice. We all want to be able to take pride in our video productions and DV provides results that rival the pros. While judging video quality is (to some extent) subjective, DV's superior quality is quite obvious. Roughly speaking, VHS shows 240 lines of resolution, while Hi8 might show 400, but DV has the potential to display over 500 lines of resolution. While new MPEG-2 format HD camcorders from JVC have even higher potential resolution and may be the wave of the future, DV currently dominates the day.

A good soundtrack is as important to home movies as it is to a high-budget Hollywood production. Whether it is the rumbling of movie special effects or the laughter of friends and family, the sounds that go along with your video are as much a part of the experience as the images themselves. DV has the potential for better than CD quality sound: 16-bit samples with 48,000 samples per second. Check your camera's audio settings, though, since many camcorders come default from the factory set to record inferior 12-bit, 32kHz audio. Of course you'll definitely want to get a decent external microphone to take full advantage of the potential audio quality of DV.

DV is more than just great looking images and CD quality sound. Of almost equal importance is the way you can move digital data around. DV camcorders incorporate a FireWire port, based on the IEEE-1394 standard (called "i.LINK" by Sony).

The cool thing about the FireWire port on the DV camcorder is that it allows the camcorder to communicate with other devices, like a personal computer or standalone editing-appliance. FireWire makes it possible for a computer to control the camcorder, but more importantly, it allows the camcorder to transfer the captured video and audio to the PC in the same digital format in which it is stored. With analog camcorders, the video must be converted to a digital format before it can be transferred to a digital device, a process commonly called "digitizing." With DV, the video is already digital, so it doesn't have to be digitized. Instead, it is simply copied from one destination to the other. While this may seem like nothing more than a matter of semantics, it's actually very important. In all cases, analog transfer of video results in some degradation in image and sound quality. When you copy your DV video from your camcorder to a computer using the FireWire interface, there is no loss at all. Note that this works both ways. If you have video on your PC, and it is in the DV format, you can copy the video data to DV tape without losing any quality.

DV and FireWire make it possible for you to edit your videos easily and without the losses encountered with analog video. Today a video editing computer can be less expensive than your camcorder. Many computers come with a FireWire interface as standard equipment and include software that can handle all the basic editing functions most hobbyists need. For less than $1,000 you can have a state-of-the-art digital editing suite that is the equal of any professional system. DV brings us both the low costs of mass production, and the sophistication of professional equipment. As the quality and versatility of the equipment grows, the prices decline. Once you have your video on a hard drive, the things you can do with it are limited only by your imagination and the capabilities of your editing software.