Digital Photography: The year gone by

Digital Photography: The year gone by

Sudeep Naik, Dec 31, 2008 1612 hrs IST

Here's a recap of what happened in the digicam world in 2008 and what we could expect in the months to come.

HD Video

With everyone frantically running around being HD-ready, many digital camera manufacturers have launched models that can record video in 720p or 1080i resolution. Though it looks really great on paper, the HD video recorded on these cameras can hardly be called HD. The videos have the resolution but they totally lack the quality or the frame rate that is expected from them. Even so, I'm hopeful that we'll see the quality improve over the coming months.

Since, we are talking about HD one should also note that recording HD videos takes a lot of space and given the capacity of memory cards available with most consumers, recording more than a few minutes of HD videos seems highly unlikely unless manufacturers start using better video compression codec like AVHCD. High capacity memory cards too should be affordable soon enough.

Also, given the high cost of component video cables, the use of HDMI output seems like a natural progression if HD video-recording is to go main stream.