For a half dozen years, we have made extensive use of a Sony Hi-8 camcorder in our multimedia education and consultation activities. With video capture cards in our PCs, we have converted the camera's analog video output into the digital forms of both still images and motion video. In our multimedia courses, students use these digital forms to create multimedia content ranging from personal resumes to business kiosks. In our consulting business, we incorporate the digital forms into web sites and other forms of outreach and advertising for small businesses in our community. We have employed a succession of video capture cards, starting with an Intel Smart Video Recorder, then upgrading to the ISVR Pro, then to Pinnacle's miroVIDEO DC-30 card, and most recently getting a software upgrade that is almost equivalent to the DC-30 Pro. We have upgraded the capture card's host PC from a 90 MHz Pentium to a 200 MHz Pentium MMX and doubled its hard drive and RAM capacity twice. Only the Hi-8 camcorder remained unchanged, as major manufacturers shipped attractive digital camcorders that use the new Mini DV (Digital Video) cassette standard.
In the categorization of consumers as pioneers, early adopters, early mass market, late mass market, and laggards, we can seldom afford to be pioneers. We avoid buying whatever is newest because of the exorbitant prices, quirky behaviors, and other arrows that define the category of pioneers. Instead, we wait for prices to drop and support to improve and we make sure that what we buy represents a real improvement in our particular applications. This defines us as early mass market purchasers. (Because you are reading this, you probably share our feeling of sufficient competence to buy a new product well before enough friends and relatives buy it to provide the support group that makes a late mass market purchaser feel comfortable. And, of course, you and we need not wait with the laggards until new technologies to come as favors in cereal boxes.)
As early mass market purchasers, we were not at all sure that a digital video camcorder would improve our bottom line results enough to justify its cost. Even when our Sony camcorder's tape drive died hideously in front of a packed classroom, requiring us to beg audio visual services for an unfamiliar, hurry-up, minimal-quality replacement unit, we felt little pressure to upgrade to DV. We always operate on line power, and we have a small Hi-8 VCR that we can add to the Sony's still-functional camera section to make a complete camcorder. Thus we felt no need to fork over several hundred dollars to get an estimate of the cost to repair the camcorder. We lost only some operating convenience. Nevertheless, the continual inconvenience motivated us to consider respects in which a DV camcorder would let us better serve our students and clients. We became less reluctant to recognize advantages of DV when we noted that relevant DV camcorder street prices had dropped from $3,000 to $1,500 since we had last priced them.
