Why I ditched my phone for a camcorder

Like you, I take my phone everywhere. I check my email, I scroll X, I call my wife and ask her if there's anything she needs me to pick up on my way home.

And I take photos and videos. Of everything. The lake, the gulls, the mountains, the houses, the flowers, the woods, my son, my daughter, my wife, my life. Every video in my phone is less than 30 seconds, and most aren’t more than 10.

Who would have thought that the iPhone would essentially eliminate what we used to call 'home movies'?

A little clip of a deer behind the house. A shot of a kid cracking a wiffle ball or running the bases. My phone is full of these short little bursts.

That’s something different about our era. My parents didn’t take hundreds of five-second clips of my brother, sister, and me. They took long, 10-minute videos with a camcorder. Remember those?

Focus on the family

They’d record these long videos at birthday parties, in the car on family trips, or at my uncle’s cabin. A whole inning of Little League, the soft lull of conversation between Mom and Dad in the background. My mom would ask us questions, interviewing us kids like little adults for what felt like eternity, the zoom moving in and out as we reluctantly answered her questions.

Those old family videos feel so much slower and so much less frantic. I don’t know what it is exactly, but in the short ones on our iPhones, it feels like life is happening in a disjointed fashion. Or like people are performing. Or like everything is sped up 20%. I suppose it’s because we don’t get a sense for the scene or the place. We have no context. All we have is an eight-second clip and a question, years later, about where that was.

On the old videos, mom and dad would narrate in a kind of family documentarian way, as if curating historical footage for future reference. “So it’s August 17, 1996, and we are visiting Grandma at the cabin. It’s about 85 degrees, and this is the last trip of the summer. How’s everybody doing? What did you think, kids? Are you having fun?” Stuff like that.

Mom and dad would walk around the house with the camera, coming upon a kid in the bedroom reading or playing, film the kid from a distance, zooming in on fingers or eyes, the camera shaking.

They’d find my grandparents at the table and joke about a few things. My dad would zoom in on my mom getting dinner ready in the kitchen, the soft hum of the tape heard on the mic. My mom would frame a long shot of my dad, outside, smoking his pipe, reading.

Video vérité

Those long shots on the camcorders were slices of life as it really was. Watching the videos, you feel the time and place and even the real — or more real — behaviors of the people on the screen. Walking slowly with Mom or Dad around the house stirs memories of bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, and living rooms in ways the short little iPhone clips can’t.

Realizing this, I bought an old camcorder. I found a Sony Handycam DCR-SR62 on eBay for 50 bucks and a battery on Amazon for 12.

It's old-school but not too old-school. The most annoying thing about the old camcorders was the hassle of bringing analog footage into the digital age. If you want to transfer tape onto computer, it takes a long time. If you have a two-hour video, it takes two hours to get it on the computer.

What's nice about the Sony Handycam model I bought is that there are no tapes or disks. All video is stored on an internal hard drive, which can then be transferred to your computer just as easily as you transfer photos from any digital camera. Essentially, you get the best of both worlds: digital transfer speed and long-form family video.

RELATED: Forget streaming — I just want my Blockbuster Video back

James Laynse/Getty Images

Real to reels

In theory, we should be able to record 10-minute slice-of-life videos on our iPhones. But we don’t. The format of the technology pushes us in a different direction. Consuming reels on Instagram nudges our tastes toward short-form portrait and away from long-form landscape.

The technology we use shapes the way we live. That’s obvious, of course, but it’s a realization that seems to be continually rediscovered, or revealed, in ways that we never could have anticipated. Who would have thought that the iPhone would essentially eliminate what we used to call "home movies"?

I took my Sony Handycam to the beach at the end of the summer. I filmed my kids eating string cheese and sharing a can of sparkling water. I zoomed in on sailboats in the distance, walked up and down the beach recording the kids running in front of me, and interviewed them just like my mom interviewed us.

“So it’s September 30, 2025, and we are at beach. How’s the food? Can you believe we are swimming in September? Did you guys jump in the water? What do we think, was it cold? What was your favorite thing we did this summer?”