At the risk of dating myself, when I was growing up, my parents' main way of capturing family memories was with the trusty old Kodak Brownie camera of the 1950s. When Kodak and others came out with their color cameras, my folks moved quickly to this new camera format. However, my uncle, who was the only one with money in the family, had the 16-mm video camera, and it was his responsibility to record any big events in the life of our brood.

For those old enough to remember, these cameras were clunky at best, and after the film was processed, you had to show it on a special projector that had frame rates that made the images on the screen choppy. To get really good videos you had to spend a lot of money, so the majority of the family videos we have from those days are of poor quality.

Thankfully, by the time my son was born in the late 1970s, video cameras and video technology had come a long way. The first video camera I had was huge and used a VCR tape as its recording medium. But thanks to this camera, we have his first steps, his first words spoken, etc. By the late 1980s, video cameras had become smaller, and by the time he turned 10, most of our videos were taken on a much smaller camera and on much smaller DVC tapes. And by the time he got married at 22, I had graduated to smaller camcorders; and now that he has two little girls of his own, we use a small hand-held HD camcorder to capture their playful moments.

But even these smaller HD camcorders do not fit in a pocket or a purse, so taking video of the family has tended to be relegated to special events instead of spontaneous moments. The next major evolution of the personal video recorder has come in the way of devices like the by Cisco, and the integration of video cameras into smartphones. It's now much more feasible to capture any moment spontaneously and to post a video of it directly to YouTube.

Source: PC Magazine