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Anyone looking to get a new video cassette recorder may want to hold out till the end of the year. I've seen a couple articles this week on release dates for Panasonics DVC and DVCPro equipment. DVC stands for Digital Video Cassette. Sony and Panasonic are going to introduce camcorders and VTR's. DVC has hi res, lossless digital dubbing, small tape (6.5mm), and can support 4X playback speed for transfer to non-linear editors. The DVC format uses 5:1 intraframe compression. That means each frame is individually addressable and no motion artifacts. A 3 CCD handycam from Panasonic has 500 lines, CD-quality audio, and they say better quality playback than Digital Betacam. Retail price is around $3500, which is the current price of the 3CCD Hi8 camcorders. DVC seems to be the planned successor to VHS/SVHS. JVC, GE, and Hitachi plan to introduce products also. DVCPro is an upscale format for ENG work. I think the specs are higher than DVC, but so are the prices. They do have a nifty portable editor the size of a laptop that has dual decks, two 5" color LCD displays, and dual jog dials. Sorta like a portable Sony EVO-9750. The signal-to-noise ratio is 54dB, component digital, 5.75Mhz luminance bandwidth. DVC uses oxide tape which is much cheaper than BetaSP tape. I was planning on upgrading my Sony SLV-R5 SVHS deck, but since I have a PVR I'm going to wait and see how the DVC decks turn out. BetaSP is out of my price range, even the UVW-1800. I can always rent a BetaSP deck when needed. For the high end DVCPro has many competitors, but the prosumer/industrial market only has SVHS in the $3K range.