On February 1, JVC KENWOOD released the financial results briefing materials for the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 2022. According to the report, production of consumer video cameras will end in October 2021, and its resources will be shifted to another growth business. The first iPhone (left) and iPhone 3G (right) that were not sold in Japan. Neither of them can record video with the genuine app, and I think many people wondered if he was still doing the recording function from the next iPhone 3GS. It is true that many people think that the business has already ended because new video camera products, including those of other companies, have not been released these days, but the business is not over because no new products have been released. As long as the old product is manufactured and shipped, it is not the end of the business for the company. Therefore, the end of production of JVC KENWOOD will be shipped to the end if it is in stock, but it can be regarded as the end of business as soon as it runs out. Consumer video cameras were the world's leading field by Japan by an overwhelming margin. Most domestic consumer electronics manufacturers have entered the video camera market. Sony, Panasonic, Canon, and JVC KENWOOD are hard to come up with, but Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, and Sanyo Electric also had products in the past. Video cameras have grown from analog to digital, from tape to disc, and from disc to memory, tracing the history of recording formats more than still cameras. This time, I would like to summarize the flow of video camera development and decline.

Analog era

If you go back to a consumer video camera, you'll come across U-matic. U-matic was standardized by Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial (at that time), and JVC (at that time), and the camera part and deck part were separate. The product was released in 1971, but after that, it was introduced significantly in the broadcasting industry, and it revolutionized ENG (Electric News Gathering) in the press. Nowadays, video coverage is commonplace, but before that, 16mm film coverage was the main focus in the news. After that, in the consumer field, "Betamax vs. VHS War" occurred as a tape deck, but in the video camera, it was "8mm video vs. VHS-C War". When Sony hit a movie camera that used a beta cassette smaller than VHS as a recording medium, Victor introduced VHS-C, which made VHS smaller and compatible with adapters. The beta vs. VHS war also happened with movie cameras, but beta camps such as Sony have expanded to compete with smaller 8mm video. Even in the broadcasting industry, many of you may not know that there was a "beta vs. VHS war". Around 1984, a confrontation between Sony's "Betacam" and "M", which was jointly developed by Matsushita Electric and NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories, took place as a camera system for ENG. The tape size was exactly Betamax and VHS, but it was settled with Betamax dominance in about a year. After that, "M" evolved into an improved new format "M II", which was introduced in large quantities to NHK. 8mm video vs. VHS-C was settled when Sony's "CCD-TR55" in 1989 became a big hit as a "passport size". Even though it is the size of a passport, the passport at that time was larger than it is now. The length and width are the same size as the passport, but the thickness is considerable. 8mm and later Hi-8 were not popular as stationary decks. In the current sense, it may seem inconvenient if the tape cannot be played on the deck connected to the TV, but at that time it was the mainstream to connect the camera itself to the TV, and it was convenient to take out the media and play it on another device. The world has not caught up with sex yet.

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