Remember the pride of shooting your first home video and watching it on TV? Or did you ever rush to send an email and receive your first email? How about editing your first digital video into a 1 minute highlight reel and email it to your far-flung relatives?

Whatever is, chance are you haven't experienced the digital video scenario just yet. But you probably will , and sooner than you might expect. Digital Camcorders are rapidly going mainstream, thank in large part to plunging prices. PC equipped to handle digital video are blossoming like springtime flowers. And since both sides "speak" digital, you can transfer video clips from your comcorders without any conversion process or loss of quality.

But as intriguing as the camcorder-computer marriage is, you needn't be a budding electronic filmmaker to like what digital video brings to your home movies. Just as digital technology's precision revamped our expectations of audio gear,digital camcorders quite literally bring out home movies into the big leages. The digital video, recording technique used by most consumer digital camcorders is the same one used by an increasing number of professional and semipro video cameras. The result is video clarity that's noticeably sharper and richer than analog formats such as VHS, VHS-C or 8mm.

Like analog camcorders, digital video use a CCD sensor that records images as colored points of light that get converted into eletrical data and stores onto tape. But digital camcorders record that data as a precise stream of one and zero rather than analog wave-forms, and store them on Mini-Digital-Video tape cassette, which are even smaller than 8mm or VHS-C tapes. This process, coupled with various signal filters and pixel sampling techniques, produces a highly accurate and very clean recording , with a high signal-to noise ratio and virtually no picture 'dropouts'. A few of the digital camera use three CCD sensors, but most of them emplay a single sensor.

Nowaday, most digital video come with a photo mode that enables you to snap a still picture with your camcorder. Typically , the quality of these stills is only mediocre, since digital camcorders capture images at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. Most of today's megapixel digital cameras ,by contrast, capture images that comprise three to six times that many pixels, yielding pictures on paper that look far more like film prints. But for pictures destined to appear on TV or PC screens , to be attached to an email or posted to a Web site, for instance - a digital camcorders's low resolution is fine.

Progressive scan technology also enables some digital camcorders to capture some digital camcorders to capture and play back exceptionally clear frame by frame pictures of a fast-action video sequence such as a golf swing or an amusement ride. Many digital camcorders employ some form of image stabilization technology too, which is particularly useful because these devices are usually very compact and designed to be used with one hand. Their petiteness may mean sacrificing some size on your color LCD viewscreen, however. Some come with 
smallish 2 or 2.5 inch screens, though some still manage to fit 3 to 4 inch screens.

Despite their generally smaller size, you don't lose much with digital video when it comes to zoom capabilities. Most of these cameras have optical zoom lenses of between 10x and 20x , and digital zooms from 48x to 360x. (As with digital cameras, optical zoom is key since it lets you focus more tightly on your subject, while digital zoom magnifies a  portion of the existing frame with incresingly less picture clarity). Digital camcorders can shoot in very low light too,and thanks to a combination of better optics and eletronics, they are generally quicker than analog camcorders when it comes to adapting to varying light confitions, such as moving from bright sunshine to indoors.

Most digital video come with a few built in special effects ( such as creating a sepia tone look) , as well as a handful of transitional effects like fades, wipes, and dissolves. But for serious editing, the big adventage to digital camcorders is that you can move the video to a PC and do some non-linear editing , which let you quickly find, cut , and reorder video segments. Virtually all digital camcorders now have a 1394 ( also know as iLink or Firewire) port for rapidly transferring video to a PC with a like port. Most PCs do not yet come with a 1394 port, but that's changing , some of the latest computer models have one, and you can add a 1394 port to a desktop PC for about Malaysia Ringgit RM 800. Some also included editing software for adding  titles and special effects.

You will need lots of hard disk space to edit video on your computer. Digital Video can take up more than 200MB of space per minute, so you may need a spare 2 or 3 Gigabytes ( not an outrageour sum for newer PCs) for even modest projects. But you can edit short stretches of video at a time on your PC and send the finished clips back to the digital camcorders tape as you go. You can also save and compress video into computer files (typically AVI format on Windows or QuickTime on Macs) that can be uploaded to Web sites, email to friends,or even  used in business presentations. And as faster Internet connections in the home take hold, digital video swapping will become even more common place. It may be only a matter of time before you hear a synthesized voice mouthing the words "You've got video".

Meanwhile , the benefits of digital video are embodied in newly afforable camcorders that we can all use to chronicle our lives, edited or not.

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