One of the major advances in consumer electronics in recent years was the introduction of the camcorder in 1983 by Sanyo and Philips. The home VCR had been available for some years and so there was a ready acceptance for a system which would allow VCR owners to shoot and view their own `movies'.
The operation of the camcorder is basically very simple. The image is focused through the lens onto a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) unit. This is an electronic array of digital eyes which is able to convert the incoming image into a set of digital red, green and blue information. The information is processed by microchips before being written to the video portion of the video tape. The audio recording is captured by the camcorder's microphone and fed to a second portion of the video tape by independent audio heads.
There are three formats of camcorder in current use today. The VHS system uses standard format VHS tapes which may be replayed in most home VCRs directly. The VHSC format, a compact version of the VHS system, can be replayed in home VCR's via a special cassette adapter. The last and one of the most popular is the 8mm format. These tapes are small giving a lightweight, compact camcorder with high performance. The disadvantage of this tape's format is the inability to be played on domestic VHS VCR's; they must first be copied to a VHS tape resulting in loss of video quality.
Recently SVHS and Hi8 have added two new high definition formats. These are backward compatible with VHS and 8mm, respectively.
