Do you remember these guys?

No not the lesbians on the tapes, the tapes themselves

These are MiniDV tapes. Contrary to a common misconseption, these tapes are digital, just because it's on tape doesn't mean it's analoge. The DV in mini DV means Digital Video. Launched in 1995 by a team of manufacturers, namely Sony and Panasonic (the usual suspects sans Philips). The broader DV format comes in a wide range of sizes, but miniDV was the most common for consumer camcorders, and that's what you see here. Like all tape formats they don't have flash or optical memory, if you want to see a particular part of the tape you have to run all the way to it. Not convenient at all, but very cute.

Why bother?

Ritual, tactile satisfaction, a high pitched hum. All these great things have been killed by moving away from tapes. I joke, but the tactile joy of cracking one of these cases open and slipping it into a tape port is extremely satisfying

The port in question

So how has the quality stood up? It's alright, 721x480 for NTSC and 720x576 for PAL. But the tapes themselves do have a shelf life, estimated to be about thirty years at most. So you just back it up right?

The Death of Firewire

Today everything interfaces with USB, the size may vary, but USB is the undesputed standard. This is not so the case for most MiniDV camcorders. They use Firewire, a system rendered obsolete, seemingly for no good reason. And before we go ahead, if you see "Firewire to USB" converter, these are scams. Firewire and USB are completely different transfer formats, you can't just plug a Firewire in on one end and a USB in the other, they speak different languages effectivly.So what can you do? Well options aren't great. There are a wide range of capture cards you can use to transfer the signal into a modern input but they all have issues. From incorrect colour grading, artifacting, and resolutoin decreases. Before you want to go use these cute little tapes, bear that in mind.

Note that this one has a USB-out, but this cannot trasfer video, the DV port is the required output for exporting video

Originally published 25/12/08