EVERY now and then, humanity wakes up, looks at itself in the mirror and realizes that it's been wasting a lot of effort doing things the old way just for the sake of tradition. From the caveman who first put a bunch of rolling logs under something heavy, to the genius who packed four times more orange juice onto a truck by condensing it first, history is filled with "Aha!" moments that propel society forward.
JVC had just such a moment when it looked at how people were using camcorders. "Let us get this straight," the corporate entity said (I'm paraphrasing here). "People buy tapes to put into their camcorders. They fill up a tape, then rewind it and play it into a computer - which takes a whole hour per tape - so that they can edit it and burn a DVD. Or maybe they buy one of those camcorders that record directly onto miniature DVD's, which are very expensive, hold only 20 minutes of video and can't easily be edited on a computer."
The "Aha!" moment came when JVC looked at the iPod. Why, JVC wondered, are we still recording onto tapes and discs, if we can record directly onto a tiny little hard drive like the iPod's? The camcorder could hold hours and hours of video, and you'd never have to buy another tape or specialized blank DVD.
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But because the transfer-and-edit process is so confusing, the Everio G winds up suited for a very specific audience: people techno-shy enough to want the world's easiest-to-use camcorder, but techno-savvy enough for its awkward video-importing challenge. It may take JVC one more "Aha!" moment to realize and correct that contradiction.
David Pogue, "Aha! Video Straight to a Computer, NYTimes.com, 22 Sep 2005. via Tomalak
