Hollywood actress Yvonne De Carlo uses the iconic Bolex H-16 16mm cinecamera, which was popular for making home movies in the 1940s and 50s.Photograph: GettyWith films as with stills, many people wanted to see results immediately rather than having to wait for processing. Polaroid's Polavision camera was an early pre-digital attempt to cut the lag – but it never caught on.Photograph: PRKodak's Super 8 movie format packaged film in a cartridge, thus removing all the problems amateurs had with threading the film in the camera. It created a mini-boom in home movies in the 1970s.Photograph: GettyIntroduced in 1983, Sony's Betamovie BMC-100 was the world's first camcorder – a video cassette recorder and video camera combinedPhotograph: PRThe rival VHS format used a bigger cassette than Sony's, making for huge cameras. Released in 1984, the JVC GR-C1 solved that problem by introducing the compact VHS-C cartridge and was notable as the first all-in-one VHS camcorder. Its appearance in the film Back to the Future, starring Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd, did no harm to its sales.Photograph: PRSony vice president Jay Sato holds the company's first MiniDV camera – the DCR-VX1000, which hit the market in 1995. It set a new standard with the tiny MiniDV cartridge and enabled users to transfer films to a PC or Mac for editing.Photograph: Marty Katz /APHitachi's MV100 – the world's first DVD-RAM camcorder – was released in 2000 and enabled users to record their films directly to a DVD disc.Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsonu/AFPThe Panasonic AG HVX200 is a fixed lens high-definition camcorder, released in December 2005. It can record digital video onto memory cards as well as MiniDV tapes, and brought high-definition to the mass market.Photograph: PRIs that a gun in your pocket, or are you going to video me? With the tiny Flip Video camera, anybody can be a film-maker. Photograph: David Levene /David Levene
