Forgive my ignorance... I can't help thinking... (after all I just bought a TM300 which use solid state memory) I strongly feel, few years to come, I will be selecting my first prosumer cam... Just like my photography... I'm moving from point n shoot to 1D pro series body... As my creativity improve, I always go for better bodies...

Why do pro cam still use tape? I've had Sony TRV320E for 9 years... I hate capturing 1 hr video... I have to wait for one hour... with current memory, the capture almost instant...

Precedence. Tape is a very robust medium that can handle the data rate. It took the industry hundreds of millions of dollars to standardize a high performance, high quality transportation system, so there's no reason to change.

Tape had 30+ years of dominance in broadcast video. Flash memory (at high bandwidth) is still young and unproven. It's good enough for AVCHD, a consumer-only format.

There is some slow progress towards memory cards and professional video, but it probably won't be using SDHC as you currently know it. Panasonic recently introduced 'Class 10', meaning that it has a guaranteed minimum write speed of 10 MB/sec, but if no one else adopts the standard it could be short-lived.

Flash based prosumer cams are coming out but industry has always been a bit slow in this respect. Industry has never really been on the cutting edge. It tends to stick with what is known, has been proven and what is accepted.

None the less...Panasonic has gone avchd flash while Sony has stuck with mpeg2 on flash.... and of those 2... Sony's mpeg2 base is being taken more seriously;

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/micro-xdcamexsite/cat-broadcastcameras/

http://www.vistek.ca/store/ProVideoCamcorders/241415/panasonic-aghmc150p-introductory-kit.aspx

semi pros tend to be more stubborn too. Reluctant to change. Given the ideals from 1 or 2 decades ago. it has to have tape. It has to be big. It has to be 3CCD, and so many people are just ignorant to new technologies. I cringe when I hear a wedding videographer say that HD is a waste of time. Remember when the Sony VX1000 came out? The first semi-pro digital camcorder. Many of them wanted to keep their Panasonic M40s and MS5 full size VHS camcorders, just because it was bigger. Now a VX1000 sized camcorder looks massive.

Add reliability to the list. I have bought & returned 3 different HDD cams to use for personal HD taping of live music. The bass from the PA system caused HDD failures in all 3. You can't record on a freaked-out hard drive.

Since I switched to tape I have one 1/10 second glitch in 6 hours of tape, with HDD, my longest recording at a show was about 20 seconds before the HDD freaked.

hard drives in a portable recorder never made sense to me.

Add reliability to the list. I have bought & returned 3 different HDD cams to use for personal HD taping of live music. The bass from the PA system caused HDD failures in all 3. You can't record on a freaked-out hard drive.


HDD's don't like loud noises that's for sure... but it's not really the HDD in this case. It's the drop sensors that get all freaked out. These things come with drop sensors that lock out the HDD when they sense a drop. Heavy vibration can (and does) trigger the drop sensor. On several occasions I've recorded live music successfully with my SR11... but you need to go into the setup menu and turn off the drop sensor.

I don't like HDD either... I'm more interested in solid state storage...

I also prefer solid state.

- Record scenes,
- Copy to computer,
- Drag-n-drop in Vegas.

Done!

I can't stand tapes anymore. Transferring the material to the computer wastes way too much time. And while I have no problems with a mechanical hard drive in a notebook computer, I simply don't trust having a mechanical hard drive in a device that is intended to be moved around a lot!

The problem with the ongoing use of tape in the professional field is that no one wants to throw away a ton of old equipment. They've spent a fortune on that stuff, and they want to maximize their investment. So they stay with tapes a lot longer than they should.

A lot of those tape servo motors were so noisy, you could hear the camera when playing back your footage. You don't get that with HDD or solid state.

A lot of those tape servo motors were so noisy, you could hear the camera when playing back your footage. You don't get that with HDD or solid state.

I bought an Aiptek GoHD+ which had servo motors for auto-focus and zoom. They were so loud you could hear the motor-boating on the soundtrack. It was a pity, because the 720P video footage was outstanding for cheap HD camcorder. It also had a 'video in' connection, which I think was removed in later models.

The tape servo noise on my Canon HV20 was the main reason for my purchase of the Rode Videomic. The original sound was simply unusable! The original sound on my solid state Canon HF200 however, despite not being what one would call high fidelity, is perfectly serviceable in a pinch. But for events where decent sound is extremely important, I have a Rode Stereo Videomic and a shoe mount adapter for that.

It's funny. I don't have what one would call "pro" equipment, but the results are pretty darn close to it!