Show some love for Digital8
 

I bought about 3 or 4 Digital8 Sonys now, one I lent to a friend and he still has it, the intent there was for him to dub his tape collection to PC, what I love about it is pass through of any analog to digital even live! No need for a tape, and there's Firewire support!

Did you guys know that Firewire supposedly supports Digital Surround? I read that it's capable of things like DTS or Dolby Digital, but it's already set to be phased out and it works like a charm on so many devices.

My feeling is it can stand to be around longer in the digital age.

Digital8 initially got scorn from me, as MiniDV and DV came about at the same time and Panasonic had put out some super high price camcorders in the ProSumer lineup.
Sony again played the angle of filling a stop-gap, they did this with MiniDisc as well, creating a video camera that records on MD format! VERY rare, and expensive nowadays.

They also created a STop Gap with video on floppydisk using Mavica line cameras. It's very interesting but not too useful. Early Handycams recorded on Memorystick as well, but they didn't get the quality that later came to pass

Indeed, it was a good format. Video8 and Hi8 were excellent formats, better than VHS, and Digital8 built on that by being a reverse compatible DV variant. In my opinion, 8mm based tapes were superior to the analog home-recording formats (VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS-C) -- especially Hi8. And Digital8 tapes were often more robust than DV tapes.

Now, Sony made a lot of terrible formats -- MicroMV, MiniDisc, magneto optical drives, floppy disk cameras, etc.

As far as sound support on Digital8, I don't really know, and it probably differs from Sony camera to Sony camera, if it exists at all. Sony has a bad habit of making things on paper only.

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