Back in 1999 when I was 20 years old I paid $2000 for this brand new Sony TRV900 video camera. I was really excited to get it. It was a lot of money for me. The most I had spent on anything in my entire life up to that point. It was a small professional quality camera that recorded to miniDV tape and would allow me to edit my video with a computer.

Remember I was an aspiring filmmaker. Digital video changed our lives back then. To shoot something on actual film was incredibly expensive, even Steven Spielberg was once quoted as saying that 35mm film was a more expensive addiction than crack cocaine. While digital video didn’t look anything like film, much to my and many indie filmmakers disappointment, it was something well within our reach. Add to that the ability to easily import video into the computer for editing, which up to that point had been an expensive pain the ass, I was all excited.

Remember this was only 11 years ago. If you think the world hasn’t changed much in the last decade, think again. We all take video on our computes for granted these days. Sites like youtube and cell phones that can shoot HD video are all too common now. But there was a time a decade ago that all of that would have been our wildest wet dream.

Today for $800 you can buy something like a Canon T2i camera that looks like a traditional single lens reflex (SLR) camera, but is digital and shoot high definition video with interchangeable lenses, 24p film frame rate and wonderful depth of field. You can literally use a camera like this to emulate the look of 35mm motion picture film that would cost you hundreds of time more to shoot with. Yeah, all for only $800 bucks. Crazy times we live in. Man I would have given my left nut for a camera like this back when I was 20.