Camcorder History

Sony DV Handycam
A camcorder is a portable consumer electronics device for recording video and audio using a built-in recorder unit. The camcorder contains both a video camera and a video recorder in one unit, hence its compound name.
The earliest camcorders employed analog recording onto videotape. Since the 1990s digital recording has become the norm, but tape remained the primary recording media. Starting from early 2000s tape as storage media is being gradually replaced with tapeless solutions like optical disks, hard disk drives and flash memory.
All tape-based camcorders have removable media in form of video cassettes. Solid-state camcorders can have either removable media in form of memory cards, or built-in memory, or both. HDD-based camcorders usually have non-removable media in form of a hard disk drive (HDD).
Camcorders that do not use magnetic tape are often called tapeless camcorders. Camcorders that use two different types of media, like built-in HDD and memory card, are often called hybrid camcorders.