Difference Between Camcorder and Video Camera

Video camera and camcorder are two equipment that are used to acquire motion pictures electronically. These devices are now very common and can be found at almost every household. Video cameras and camcorders are used widely in fields such as the film industry, television industry and communication technologies. Since these are now common households, it is important to get a good understanding about the concepts and the mechanisms used in video cameras and camcorders. The video camera and the camcorder may look alike, but there are some basic differences between the two. In this article, we are going to talk about what video cameras and camcorders are, the fields that use video cameras and camcorders, the basic similarities between camcorders and video cameras, the pros and cons, and finally the difference between video cameras and camcorders.

Video Camera

A video camera is a device that is used to capture motion and convert it into an electronic signal. John Logie Baird was the pioneer in introducing video camera. The oldest video camera was created by him. This camera was based on a Nipkow disk, which is an electromechanical apparatus. The earliest cameras used in the industry were the British Broadcasting Corporation’s test cameras. Most of the early cameras were based on cathode ray tubes (CRT), but later as solid state devices such as charged coupled devices (CCD) and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies developed cameras acquired these technologies to produce more reliable and durable video cameras than the cathode ray tube cameras. Modern day cameras are relatively small and yet more powerful than the early ones. The term video camera literally means a standalone video camera, which only does the conversion of optical signal to an electronic signal. The recording of the electronic signal is usually done in a separate device, which takes the output from the video camera as its input. Storage media can be magnetic tapes (video cassettes), hard drives, DVDs (Digital Versatile disc), or memory cards.

Camcorder

The word camcorder is derived from the phrase “video camera recorder”. This is basically a video camera and a recorder coupled in a single device. Most of the modern day cameras are camcorders. The mobility of a camcorder is high since almost all of the field cameras are camcorders. Camcorders also have the same storage media as video recorders. Giving part of the camera space for recording device, there is loss of quality compared to a same sized video camera.