For the record: Some of the most impressive camcorders being made at the moment are compact or pocket recorders. Tokyo-based Amadana, known for stylish contributions to more routine products such as hair dryers, has crafted a unique-looking camcorder with its new SAL. The SAL looks like an old digital audio player, with a small screen on the top half of its rectangular slab and the control buttons clustered on the bottom half. The lens is on the reverse side of the SAL, with the user pointing it at the subject while framing the view on the small screen.
Regular camcorders are designed to take hours of video footage for viewing on a TV later and/or storage in some way. They rely mainly on portable storage, particularly memory cards. The SAL, in contrast, is only able to record up to 2 hours of footage in its 2-gigabyte memory. When full, the device can be connected to a computer and the video downloaded, at which point the SAL's memory is cleared.
In return for the curtailed video time, the SAL offers much greater portability than normal camcorders, weighing a mere 85 grams and measuring 95×54×12 mm. The small size, however, curtails the camcorder's performance, and it boasts only a 2-inch 320×240 screen. The device uses a 3-megabyte CMOS sensor and records video in the MPEG4 format at a modest resolution of 640×480 and a frame rate of 30fps. Audio recording is also a bit limited with only a mono microphone.