HDCAM

thumb|Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta HDCAM camcorder

HDCAM is a high-definition video digital recording videocassette version of Digital Betacam introduced in 1997 that uses an 8-bit discrete cosine transform (DCT) compressed 3:1:1 recording, in 1080i-compatible down-sampled resolution of , and adding 24p and 23.976 progressive segmented frame (PsF) modes to later models. The HDCAM codec uses rectangular pixels and as such the recorded content is upsampled to on playback. The recorded video bit rate is . Audio is also similar, with four channels of AES3 20-bit, digital audio. Like Betacam, HDCAM tapes were produced in small and large cassette sizes; the small cassette uses the same form factor as the original Betamax. The main competitor to HDCAM was the DVCPRO HD format offered by Panasonic, which uses a similar compression scheme and bit rates ranging from 40 to depending on frame rate.