As many of us can remember, the early days of home video recording and photography consisted of big bulky tapes, rolls of delicate film and sometimes huge devices slung over dads shoulder as he sluggishly ran after the kids in the park. Luckily for us today, home video and photography has become a more accessible and realistic hobby for the masses and video can now be shot straight from a mini-recorder, often in a single hand.

Prices are also now very attractive with even big name brands being affordable for nearly everyone. Rarely do we see or know of people nowadays that do not own a device that takes pictures and with prices dropping every month and technology developing by the day, this has become a hobby now accessible to people from all walks of life and across the globe.

Even in recent years when we look back at the development of home photography devices, not just ten years ago were most people impressed to even see a digital screen with internals boasting 2 million mega pixels. Now if you consider this short space of time and what we see on our shelves today, 10 million mega pixels is often the norm and prices of many of these products are even lower than those we saw at 2 million mega-pixels, just that short time ago.

Photography for the everyday person has come an extremely long way in a short space of time and this is mainly due to the fact that consumers spend millions on these products. The profits made by the manufacturers over the last few years has been put into development of cameras and camcorders and profits made today will also go into creating even more impressive examples and at cheaper prices.

High Definition is perhaps one of the latest developments for home video and photography.

HD is now available with many of today’s best photography devices and everything is stored conveniently in a tiny SD card or even in the internal memory. You can take shots of your holidays, often for weeks on end and never again will you have to worry about running out of film. Nor will you have to worry about the battery-life as this is another major development by manufacturers in recent years.

Rechargeable battery life of ten hours or more is extremely common nowadays so if you want to film your day, right from the moment you walk out the door to the moment you arrive back home to say ‘honey, put the kettle on’, you can.

With so many options to choose from and so many price ranges that appear to offer the same functions and capabilities it can be a difficult task to actually make your decision.

There are pocket camcorders and even lenses fitted secretly inside pens, that you can still write with! Yes, it really has gone all ‘James Bond’ in the last few years but one thing that you can be sure of is that no-matter which device you do finally choose today, you will always walk away with high quality pictures and videos for all the family to enjoy.

Scott King is a consumer specialist who reviews the latest cameras, camcorders and other products on the market.