Although VHS-C is still a popular format for camcorders, particularly at the lower end of the price range, Video8 currently seems to be pulling ahead. Unlike the home VCR market, however, there is room for more than one portable format, and there is no reason why both should not continue. Anyone with any sense copies their valuable originals onto normal VHS for general playback anyway, so the format of these originals is completely irrelevant. JVC themselves have been guilty of muddying this issue; a recent campaign stressed the compatability of VHS-C with the home VHS recorder, as if this makes any difference at all. This presumably shows that they are worried about the rise in popularity of 8mm. In reality, the Video8 format has many benifits over VHS-C: longer running time, smaller & lighter mechanism, and the built-in capability for PCM digital sound and time-coding. These latter features have not been exploited until recently, but their presence from day one means that the format can be improved without losing compatability with existing users - so called "future proofing". Time coding, for example, which is very useful for editing as it allows edits to be accurate to a single frame, has recently appeared in top-of-the-range camcorders. Unlike rival formats' timecoding systems, it can be written onto tapes after they have been recorded, because the format has always reserved "room" for it even on machines which can't themselves handle it. The other formats can only timecode tapes as they are recorded, because the codes have to be crammed in with the other signals. The same applies to 8mm's PCM digital sound, which is written in bursts at the end of each video track, rather than being mixed with the picture as for VHS's HiFi sound. The most obvious benifits of Video8 for the average user, however, are the extra recording time, improved sound quality (even from non-PCM machines), and of course reduced size. The modern 8mm "palmcorder" is staggeringly tiny - weighing well under than a kilogram including battery and tape. In fact they have become so small that many have to have built in "image stabilisers" to cope with the difficulty of holding them still while recording!