I’m not really looking for a pocket camera right now, but I noticed something interesting on the Canon S80 press release–it’s able to record video at 1024x768@15 fps. It’s not exactly HDTV-quality, but it’s vastly better then the 640x480 that has been the standard for video for years. I suspect that the image quality is pretty good–I’d be amazed if there were any imaging artifacts left when producing 0.8MP images from an 8MP sensor, although the compressor settings might end up being a problem.

I wouldn’t expect this to kill off camcorder sales–if nothing else, I doubt that the S80’s video recording UI is very good–but it’s a sign of things to come. Frankly, the only hard part about recording standard-resolution video now is recording hours of it at a time without running out of storage space and battery life. We’ll probably see a flood of ED and HDTV recorders within a year or so, simply because the technology is making it cheap and easy, and people’s computers are easily able to handle higher-resolution and -size videos.