Last night, I was flipping through a copy of the November 24, 2003 issue of Forbes Magazine when I came across a reference to the Panasonic SVAV100 D-Snap MPEG4 Camcorder in the Digital Tools column written by Stephen Manes. The D-Snap is a tiny digital video camcorder that records directly onto Secure Digital memory cards.

The reasons to have a tapeless camcorder at this point are for their size, weight, and output format. The entire device is 1 1/4 x 2 1/8 x 3 1/2 inches and weighs less than 5 ounces. This is smaller than most digital still cameras, so you can carry it to places that you would never think of bringing a larger camcorder. The camera stores its recordings in either the MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format. This means that clips can be emailed and played by others quite easily.

The drawbacks of this type of camcorder are recording capacity and limited editing software support for the tapeless camcorders and the MPEG-2/MPEG-4 formats. According to the Forbes article:

The D-snap can record just ten minutes of top-quality full-screen video on a 512-megabyte SD card. One comes with the camera; additional cards cost more than $150 each. At that rate, you'd go broke trying to record something like a wedding without an assistant to transfer the data to a computer. And since the price forces you to keep erasing and reusing the memory cards, you'd also have to figure out how to keep track of gigabytes of data and maintain the originals. Tape makes more sense: A one-hour MiniDV tape costs about $4, cheap enough to serve as its own backup.

Unlike MiniDV, MPEG-2 video is hard to edit. Panasonic's rudimentary software doesn't so much as let you combine two shots into a single scene. And the camera produces files whose names are unrecognizable to most third-party programs, though Windows Media Player can open them after momentary befuddlement.

Until I started studying the D-Snap, I had not realized that products like relatively advanced digital editing software like Final Cut Express from Apple Computer doesn't support camcorders like this one. I'm sure that support for devices like the D-Snap will happen. But, I'm not sure when the market will mature to the point where including that support becomes important to the editing software companies.

Only the true pioneers in the Operation Gadget community will be able to cope with the compromises necessary to use a camcorder like this at the moment. Buying this product now would put you so far out onto the bleeding edge that you would have difficulty sharing the experience with most other digital video enthusiats. But, I hope that as the price of SD memory cards declines, and software begins to support MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 editing better, a product like the D-Snap will become much more attractive.