I actually posted that before looking at how the spreadsheet was formatted. I'm not sure it'll work with your formatting so I think you should stick to the way you proposed it with VTR Capable on a separate line with Y/N for each model.

Yes, I was struggling with defining inputs AND VTR capable. Maybe add to "Special Functions" like this:

Video-In Connections

Digital Video (DV) - aka Firewire or Sony i.Link

S-Video (Y/C) Analog

Special Functions

External Analog to Digital Conversion

VTR Capable

Looks good, having it in a different category makes sense since it's not a video input, but rather a function and grouping it together with the A to D conversion makes sense as they're both special features.

Here's the latest version of the spreadsheet. The yellow-highlighted row titles seem to be the important ones.

Only the green-highlighted cells have been verified by me.

Hi man, I'm new to all this world of analog old camcorders, I see the list but I don't really know if all of them can work for what I want or if only some of them

I basically want to film (I actually want that vintage image that all of them have, I've been watching video samples of the 87 and I loved it) and have good sound (I mean good sound in the context of an old camera, lol) and the possibility to convert/transfer my recordings to my computer.

Which you think (or anyone else) could be my best choice of these lists?

You will be looking at this list for analog recording NTSC:

I actually own the CCD-TRV66.

What aspects of the "olden" image are you trying to emulate?

Do you want Hi8/S-VHS quality/resolution, or VHS/8mm quality?
Since you want good sound, so you may want a stereo model that can use an external stereo microphone or line level input. (Relying on an internal microphone will rarely if ever produce good audio.)

These old machines generally have been subject to storage abuse and perhaps misuse over the years, so finding a good working model will take effort. Auction sites, garage sales, and thrift shops buys are risky because the sellers rarely know or accurately report the actual condition. In any case they mainly used NiCad and NiMH batteries that by now have likely exceeded their useful life (i.e., have very limited ability to take/hold a charge).

An alternative is to shoot with a modern HD camcorder that can better cope with poor lighting and use effects software in post production to dumb down the video to emulate the legacy look when needed, and provide much better HD video what needed.

As I said I'm super new to this cameras so I don't know that much about specs
But as a reference, I've been watching videos of some of the cameras listed in the post and I liked the trv87 a lot, and by "good audio" I meant more like not distorted audio (In some videos I watched the audio was uuugly like when you get too close to a very bad micrphone), In case (again) of the trv87 I liked it

I assume is because the higher the numer, the "newer" the camera?

Thank you man, I'll be looking for these models on ebay, wish me luck since every camera I look for of the list is like 1 millon dolars on bids :(

(Sorry for the two replies of the post to quote both answers, I didn't knew how to quote both answers in the same reply)

Just want to say this thread is extremely helpful and awesome and amazing!

I've been on and off looking for Digital8 camera for a while now and the number of times that I thought I knew something about a model only to later find seemingly contradictory information about it in a different thread on a different forum is way too high. All of that's to say I think a centralised wiki describing what we know about these cameras would be a truly excellent idea!

Even if the wiki just started with what's on the excel spreadsheet right now, I think it would be extremely helpful. But since people could also slowly start adding more and more information they know to be true by owning specific models, the wiki would become even more helpful over time.

I could imagine it being similar to something like the openwrt table of hardware: https://openwrt.org/toh/start

Looking at the manual for the Sony CCD-TRV67 and I think it's actually mono not stereo out.

Looks like that is indeed the case for both the NTSC and PAL variants.

Do digital8 camcorder playing back video8 or hi8 convert to DV and/or 4:1:1 color space (for NTSC) when the signal is output to s-video?

I’ve seen differing information, so just trying to get to the bottom of what works for lossless capture.

I am trying to figure out the same thing as well. Have you found a conclusive answer?

S-video is an analog video stream, DV and 4:1:1 have no cleaning meaning for analog video streams. They have meaning for signals in the digital domain and imply the sampling and compression schemes used. They do set limits on the bandwidth (aka: frequency response or resolution) of the digital signal when converted to an analog.

You would have to examine the particulars of the D8 camcorder being used to determine what, if any form, of digital conversion are used in the analog output signal chain.



.

Looking at some Sony schematics and the common sense of engineering design the answer is no, Sony puts the DV encoder at the end of all processes right before the firewire output, Everything else such as TBC and DNR use a normal ADC and a volatile memory for few frames, probably in 8 bit but still lossless, It would take a lot of processing power to use DV codec for TBC/DNR plus a DV decoder to convert it to normal digital then off to a DAC to convert it to analog. What differentiate D8 camcorders from Hi8/V8 is that there is no 100% analog path when TBC turned off, Everything must pass through an ADC and then DAC for analog output or ADC then DV encoder out to firewire.

Judging by the service manuals, e.g this one for the TRV66, the Hi8 camcorders with TBC (and seemingly also the cheaper video8 models from the same time) also convert the head amp output to digital before any processing. Looks like it may be 10 bit ( at least for pb C) but not sure. I don't think it's inherently a bad thing though. For a full analog chain you would have to go back to the older models or VCRs where the processing was done in the analog domain. (VCRs with TBC like the EV-S9000 seems to do the main stuff in analog and use a digital block for noise reduction and TBC and Y/C filtering.)

There were a few VHS vcrs that did something similar, including the AG1980P, AGDSxxx, NVHS950, NVHS860/960 and some late model (S)VHSC camcorders. Other VHS vcrs typically did everything other than TBC, DNR (and Y/C filtering on newer SVHS decks) in analog.

I'm just trying to clarify what you're saying here.:hmm:

For D8 camcorders that can play back analog recordings on 8mm/Hi8 tapes, the analog signal is going through an ADC then a DAC before ending up at the S-video output connector on the side of the camcorder, ONLY IF the TBC is turned off or regardless if it's on or off?

Are you getting your info from a service manual for a particular DCR model?

At least for my DCR-TRV340, it's as latreche34 says: there is no direct analog output path. It's always analog-digital-analog. TBC on/off doesn't change this. (Note that this is different than saying it's DV-compressed. This digitization is uncompressed.)

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/...parison-(Hi8)-[WARNING-auto-load!]#post2431845

To clarify, if you look at service manuals (e.g the one I linked), in both the D8 camcorders and later model 8mm/Hi8 only ones the signal from the head amplifier goes through one ADC for Y and one ADC for C and the camcorder does most of the processing in digital before turning it back to analog before output. It does this regardless of whether the TBC is active. (That doesn't imply the older models with all analog chains are better though.)