What's amazing to me is just how small and light camcorders have become over the years. I still have an old Sony Hi-8 unit we bought nearly 10 years ago. We never drag it out because it's so big and bulky. The few times we've taken video recently, it's been with a mobile phone.

Enter the Sanyo Exacti E1. Weighing in at 8.3 ounces (with battery and SD card), it takes 640x480 movies at 30 frames a second, requiring a 1 gigabyte SD card for each 80 minutes of video you want to capture. It takes up to 8 gigabyte SDHC cards also, so you could capture over 10 hours of home movies on a single card! The video is compressed using H.264, which is how it is able to store so much in so little space.

In addition, the device also takes 6 megapixel pictures, has image stabilization-something you need on these small digital video cameras-and is waterproof! Just the kind of thing Dick DeBartolo, a.k.a. "The Giz Wiz" and "Mad's Magazine's Maddest Writer," would like to take on his boat! In fact, he did a podcast about the Sanyo Exacti E1 recently.