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| Home VCRs The first domestic videocassette recorders were launched in the early 1970s, but it was not until the Japanese systems, Sony's Beta (1975) and JVC's VHS, were launched, that videotape moved into the mass market, resulting in what came to be known as the "videotape format war", which VHS finally won. VHS is still the leading consumer VCR format, since its follow-ups S-VHS and D-VHS never caught up on popularity. It has, however, lost the battle against the nonlinear and disc based DVD, although like vinyl records will not become completely obsolete owing to the large number of videocassettes owned by consumers. [edit] Camcorders In camcorders, however, the field was more diverse; early camcorders generally took full-sized VHS or Betamax tapes, but the greatest popularity for some time shared by the 8 mm video format (later replaced by Hi8 and its DV hybrid relative Digital8) and VHS-C (compact) tape. MiniDV is now the most popular format for consumer camcorders, providing near-broadcast quality video and sophisticated nonlinear editing capability on consumer equipment; however, though intended as a digital successor to VHS, MiniDV VCRs are not widely available outside professional circles. Sony tried to introduce a new camcorder tape with MicroMV, but consumer interest has been low due to the proprietary nature of the format and limited support for anything but low-end Windows video editors. For high definition, the most promising system seems to be the new MiniDV-based HDV, which uses MiniDV media to store a roughly broadcast-quality HDTV data stream. There has been a trend, largely spearheaded by Hitachi, Panasonic, and Sony, to sell consumer camcorders based on DVD-family media, but professional users consider DVD camcorders too limited for anything but casual use and have remained with digital videotape or switched to solid-state or hard disk storage. |
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