Not knowing whether they would have a major impact or not, about six years ago Sony and Panasonic, together and developed the AVCHD, the Advanced Video Coding High Definition standard, and the rest, as they say, is history as it has become the de facto standard that all camcorder manufacturers use.
If you are a professional news photographer or a professional videographer then you are likely very familiar with Sony's NXCAM series of professional camcorders. The first NXCAM camcorder was such as Sony's HXR-NX5U NXCAM Digital HD Video Camcorder. It was the first in Sony's new generation of tapeless memory handycams, relying fully on flash memory.
Videographers used the NXCAM standard, which featured a hybrid mix of HD and SD memory slots, to record their high-definition video. The standard for the high-def video was set by the AVCHD and its primary feature was that the native mode for high definition video was resolution of 1920 by 1080, of 800 lines of vertical and 900 lines of horizontal video. This works out to the same resolution.
To put this another way, if you have ever watched a high-definition video or television show on an older 560 scan set, you probably notice there is a very large black area around the video. On a standard, non high-definition television (HDTV) set, this is quite natural as the maximum number of scan lines it can do is about 560 by about 600 so you do see all of the video, but it is compressed to the center of the screen. That you can see it at all is thanks to another feature of HDTV a 16:9 aspect ratio that your television (older TV set) can handle, but it does do some interesting things to it, such as scrunching it into the smaller space.
With NXCAM camcorders, such as Sony's HXR-NX5U and an HDTV, you are not only able to pick up the 16:9 video ratio, but also the higher resolution video so that you have a full-screen picture that is fine in its clarity and the crispness of its color.
The HXR-NX5U is most a professional camcorder, although you can have one, too, if you want to make that kind of investment. More importantly, though, this camcorder was the first to make use of dual memory slot technology on which to store its high-definition video. This meant that with the right memory cards you could have some long recording and playback times. (Today's SDXC high-density memory card makes it possible to have as much as 64 GB of flash memory to play with and in dual-slot machines you can have up to 128 GB.) The problem with here is we are discussing an older camcorder so only older orders of time apply. In this case, the NX5U delivers about two-and-a-half hours of video time to its hybrid memory technology.
Still, though, the key is that this is the first truly all-digital, video camcorder and it is still a professional standard, making use of the AVCHD and three, yes, three Exmor R Sony video processing engines.
This means that you can shoot excellent video at effective focal lengths of nearly 4.1 to 82 mm in standard mode, however, when you are shooting at 30 fps, your camcorder's focal length is 29.5 mm to 590mm and at 24 fps its about 30 mm to 800 mm. The NX5U allows you to shoot at a wide mix of focal lengths and speeds due to the number of processing engines available.
The NX5U was a trailblazer in the professional camcorder world and it is still so solid it is still being sold and used by Sony. The contributions it has made to the industry, though, are immeasurable.
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