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DAT replacement - DV?

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Fish Tank Z:
It seems that the origonal DAT recorded PCM fed onto a tape. The technology should be extremley similar to DV. The largest DAT tapes are around ~1.5GB, for 3 hours. (Assuming 650MB=74 minutes). But the basic DV tape is something like, 13GB. With a slower tape speed, to boot. Couldn't the DAT recording system be slightly modified to accept multiple bitrates and frequencies (Identified with a flag at the begining of the file) then be recorded onto a DV tape, which would theoretically give about 6 hours of recording at 24/96? This seems like an incredible idea, and the battery life would likely be stellar, because it's already so refined for camcorders and such. Just refine the old DAT circuitry,give it 24/96 sampling, make a new type of tape called 'DA' and pop in and record.

Fish Tank Z:
Excuse me. By DV, I mean the MiniDV tapes used in cameras.

Ed.:
i personally think that technology is moving in the other direction.  many companies are trying to get flash media and small hdds in phones and do away with tapes.  at least from what i've noticed.  plus minidv's still have to be transferred in realtime, whereas flash media can be transferred much faster.  i think flash media is going to continue to get bigger (i think right now they're up to around 5gigs for a card) and hold more - soon enuf you'll be able to record video right to flash, shove it in your flash reader, transfer it and then be able to use it again.  already they have cameras that write to dvd-r.  I think in time mini dv will go the way of DAT (not that dat is dead, but i think it is a dyeing media - its certainly being replaced)

thats just my take on the situation tho.

Fish Tank Z:
Well, a couple of points I have to make on that.

DV data can be uploaded to a comptuer at much faster than real time, it's a $3 for 13GB which is *massive* even compared to DAT. No flash card will be able to touch that for a long time, much less minature harddrives and such. Also, as a final point, Mini-DV would allow for a much smaller formfactor than DVD (Look at DVD-Cams versus DV cams) as well as probably having a longer runtime (just from what i've seen from the DV-Cams out there)

Just my opinions on why DV would be a suitor.

It doesn't seem that DVD would be apropriate, seeing it's optical and flash is so absurdly expensive (Heh.. $0.1/mb compared to $0.00002).

Ed.:
i'm not saying that writing to dvd is the best way to record.  not at all, but i think writing to a hdd is.

I may be mistaken, but my mini-dv cam transfers in realtime over firewire and usb.  maybe i'm doing something wrong, but I've yet to find instructions on transferring it faster than realtime.  I've also had my mini dv cam for a little over a year now, and just from normal use, i've already had to clean the heads on it.

Also, technically you could already tape onto dv - you just need a camera with audio imputs.  You'd have to go line-in cuz i'm not aware of any cams that have digital in, but you could do it.  my camera will tape 16/44.1 - however, only for a little over an hour, it'll do 12bit audio for an 1.5 hours.  I know you're saying that if you modify a dat you could get just audio on the tape and not video, allowing for a lot more space.  however, to me i seriously think that technology is moving away from "tape" storage and onto other things.

Also, you have to figure in the price of buying new tapes for every set.  mini-dv does degenerate over time, so if you want to get the highest quality, you should use a new tape every time.  Same as DAT tape.  I've used my njb3's hdd over and over and over and over again.  Infact, if I would have been buying DATs the whole time I had my njb3, I'd probably have a few hundred dollars worth of dats.  To me, I'd rather spend the money on other equipment.

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