I have never fully understood the obsession with camcorders. Sure, voyeurism and narcissism and their apotheosis — YouTube — have become defining threads of the American experience. (And not only American: I've bumped into families filming everything and everywhere from Lake Baikal to Bangalore.) Like most parents, I bought a video recorder three days before my daughter was born. I have all the usual stations of the (toddler) cross on film: first steps, first words, first (and last, for that matter) pony ride, a couple of Christmases. And then it stopped. Have I ever looked at any of those heartwarming moments? Nah. For one thing, the storage formats keep changing — from VHS cassettes to minicassettes to CompactFlash cards to hard drives. I'd need a technological curator to connect my ancient instrument to my current television. How old is it? Circa 1993 B.H.D. — Before High-Definition. In tech terms, that's about five generations ago.

So I decided it was finally time to join the lemmings and take possession of a high-definition camcorder. There were two simple requirements: It had to be one of the smallest available and it had to be the best. Fortunately, technology has made it possible to satisfy those demands with a single gadget: the Panasonic HDC-HS9 high-definition digital camcorder. Its features would send Steven Spielberg into a fit of envy: The camera has an optical image stabilizer that checks 4,000 times a second to make sure your hands are steady, and then compensates for them even after you've had a drink or two. It has face-detection technology. (I'm not making that up: The HS9 locates faces and then makes them look as good as nature will permit.) It also comes with a giant 60-gig hard drive, a zoom mike for surround sound, a slot for an SD card, a Leica zoom lens, and so many sophisticated editing tools that you could reshoot Waterworld and then punch it up enough to actually sell some tickets.

The thing is so small — about the size of a can of soda — that you can take it anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I found myself at Taipei airport with an hour to kill. I whipped out my camcorder and started to film in a store that sells unusual herbs and lotions made from all sorts of endangered animals. I was just working my way down the dyspepsia aisle when the police came into my viewfinder. They were not happy. I spent the rest of my time in Taiwan passing through X-ray machines and metal detectors. They ran a chemical bomb analysis on my jeans and frisked me twice. Finally, one of the police officers picked up the HS9 and played back the video. He then uttered something in Mandarin that I can only assume was "Wow." The other cops gathered round. More wows and pointing fingers. Finally, the officer in charge returned the camcorder (along with my laptop, still camera, digital tape recorder, and iPhone) and said, in perfect English, "These images are fantastic."