Camcorder

A camcorder is a self-contained, portable electronic device combining a video camera and a video recorder, built to record video and audio as its primary function. Sony introduced the first camcorders in 1983: the Betacam, which unified camera and recorder into one professional unit and became a broadcast news standard, and the Betamovie BMC-100P, a shoulder-mounted consumer model that recorded onto Betamax cassettes. Early camcorders recorded an analog signal onto videotape, and by the 2000s recording had shifted to digital formats stored on mini hard disk drives, MiniDVDs, flash memory, and SD cards. The word camcorder, blending camera and recorder, is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as first appearing in The Economist in 1982.