Requiem for a Camcorder

In the spring of 2000, I bought my first camcorder, the Canon Ultura. It was one of the early consumer-grade mini-DV, all-digital camcorders, and it was great—I remember being amazed by how vivid digital video looked compared to the graininess that I’d come to expect from analog video camcorders.
The Ultura was a great camcorder, enabling me to shoot my UK vacation that summer, and then allowing me to start shooting Miller & Mullet and other stuff. The Ultura also served as my capture and export deck for a series of Macs and Mac OS’s, and it never let me down. Until, that is, this summer while I was trying to capture footage for a short my friend Jeff had shot. After 8 years of regular (and sometimes heavy) use, the Ultura’s playback head is kaput. Not even my trusty head-cleaning tape could fix the problem.
I paid $1500 CAD, plus tax, in early 2000, which was a typical price for a camcorder back then. I remember looking at various cameras, including Sony and Panasonic, before picking the Ultura from Japan Camera at the Eaton Centre.
The Ultura is a single-chip camera, but it was a better camera than most that year. Canon had actually put in a better lens in it, much better than the ones used in their ZR-series and Elura camcorders that followed. The Firewire connection worked perfectly, as did the tape mechanism, and I never had to take it for repairs, despite the abuse it received, including shooting a feature during an incredibly hot and humid Toronto summer, capturing the footage from that feature (on nearly 30 mini-DV tapes)….
Canon withdrew the Ultura after a year in production, and I remember the replacement models weren’t of the same quality. Sure they were samller and had more buttons, but the quality wasn’t there (I’m basing my opinion on what I saw in various camera store showrooms).
I tricked the Ultura out with cheap Cokin filters (the key filters being the neutral density and circular polarizer, but I also bought 2 grades of orange for counterbalancing the ND filter, and a blue filter that I never got around to using for day-for-night shooting), so for outdoor shooting, the Ultura did a great job. Indoors, footage tended to be grainy if it wasn’t in a horribly bright room. I tried to go manual as much as possible for colour balance and exposure as the automatic controls tended to over-react to any change in lighting levels. Overall, though, I learned how to avoid the Ultura’s limitations, and I think the resulting video looked better than most one-chip productions did.
The most annoying aspect of the Ultura, though, was the audio jack. I curse whoever decided that a ⅛” plug was a better option than XLR or even 1/4 “…. The transformer I bought to convert XLR to the ⅛” worked great, but eventually you had to find the sweet spot where the plug and jack were both in full contact and the audio was actually reaching the recording head (I went through a series of cheap headphones dedicated to ensuring the audio was making it to two channels at the same time).
So… after spending several hours over a couple of nights trying to capture and recapture Jeff’s footage, I realized my beloved Ultura had reached the end of its working life and was now destined to sit as a memento on my bookcase rather than actually shoot anything.
Next time, part one of my search for a replacement.