File based camera

This means that the digital signal containing picture and sound is encoded as a 'file' and stored on either an optical disc or a solid state drive. There are quite a few different recording formats or codecs available to suit different budgets and quality expectations. Lower resolution formats are cheaper and offer more recording time per GB of drive space. High resolution, uncompressed formats offer exceptionally good 'film like' quality but are correspondingly more expensive and require much more storage space on the drive simply because they are capturing a lot more information and the file size is much larger.