High-definition consumer video cameras are tough to find these days and cost around $1,800. But next year, you might be able to grab one for $799, according to a camera chip upstart.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Ambarella has devised a family of multicore microprocessors that it says can compress and process HD video efficiently and cheaply. The company's chips could be incorporated into a video camera selling for around $799 or into digital still cameras, which would become capable of taking high-resolution stills (8 megapixels or so) as well as TV-quality video.
The company will show off the technology at the Computer Electronics Show kicking off on Jan. 5 in Las Vegas. Three major camera makers have already begun to build experimental cameras using Ambarella's chips.
"Two out of the three have fairly solid product plans," said Didier LeGall, executive vice president of Ambarella. "There is a very good chance of products showing up in Q2."
The skyrocketing cost of developing and manufacturing chips, however, has forced many to begin adopting third-party microprocessors or imagers (the chip that captures light) from companies such as Texas Instruments and NuCore.
"They want to continue to select their own solutions, but when they see an integrated solution that costs less and consumes less power, they don't have a choice," said Fermi Wang, Ambarella's CEO.
The technical demands of consumers also continue to escalate, putting further pressure on camera makers. Tape is on its way out. In Japan, nearly 85 percent of cameras on the market today rely on flash memory, hard drives or built-in DVD recorders to store video.
Demand has also increased for hybrid cameras that combine both high-quality stills with TV-quality video. To date, most cameras either have good still quality and marginal video or vice versa. Samsung released a novel camera to get around this problem; it comes with two lenses and two separate optical system.
While the two-in-one solution works, other camera makers have not followed. Researchers at Micron Technology and other companies have said the hybrid problem can be conquered through advances in microprocessing and image capture.
The increase in sales of digital TVs and programming has made HD the next check-off item for camera makers. Unfortunately, it's not easy to squeeze the functionality into a consumer camera. Encoding and decoding H.264 video (the standard for HD) requires far more complexity than other video streams, making the chips difficult to create. HD also gobbles up a lot of hard drive and memory space.
Partly as a result of the difficulties of compressing HD, not many high-definition consumer cameras have hit the market. Sony released one last year for more than $2,000. It sells for $1,799 today at places like CompUSA.
Ambarella's conviction that it can bring down HD prices with its chips could have to do with its executives' backgrounds.
Tape is the only way I know of to store native DV-quality footage. Everything else compresses it, which then makes it harder to edit.
I understand the convenience factor of already-burned DVDs and hard-drive based storage, but tape also offers the ability to keep the raw footage. Tapes may fall out of favor with mainstream consumers, but they can't disappear entirely until some other medium offers these benefits.
The claim that "tape is on its way out" is _way_ off. This claim can only hold up if one lumps digital still cameras into the total, and most still cameras are not capable of producing serious video. I would guess that roughly 85% of dedicated video cameras today _use_ tape simply because it is the only medium capable of the bitrates and storage capacity necessary for an hour or more of uncompressed video.
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I understand the convenience factor of already-burned DVDs and hard-drive based storage, but tape also offers the ability to keep the raw footage. Tapes may fall out of favor with mainstream consumers, but they can't disappear entirely until some other medium offers these benefits.
TV Video on cell phones, Blackberry TV, I-Pod TV and full lenght movies on handhelds are just around the corner.
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