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High Quality Still and Video From One Digital Camera

Techstination feature for Friday, September 5, 2003

Carrying one digital camera... for video and still pictures. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Digital camcorders have been capable of taking snapshots for a few years now... .and a lot of digital still cameras... can shoot video clips as well. But until now... users have had to sacrifice image quality on one side or the other. That's why Sony's announcement that it will ship a camcorder that is able to take 3 megapixel still images this fall... is a pretty significant step. Director of camcorder products Linda Vuolo...

"It's really a terrific digital still camera built into a full function camcorder. And we've added some of the still image features that consumers have come to enjoy on our digital still cameras like a pop up flash as well as night framing."

The only drawback is the price... about 17 hundred dollars... more than you'd pay for decent separate digital video and still cameras. Vuolo says for the first time this past May... sales of digital camcorders eclipsed those of older analog models. Another new model from Sony... will record directly on small DVD discs...

"But that DVD will play back in their DVD deck or DVD drive connected to their PC as well as Playstation 2 consoles."

Pricing will start at about 900 dollars. Sony isn't the first to create a DVD based camcorder. Models from Hitachi and Panasonic are already on the market... but Sony claims to have the edge in compatibility with DVD players. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.