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Donegal-born singer Mickey Harte pays his favourite gadget the ultimate compliments. "I take it everywhere I go," he says, and "it's one of the things in my life I couldn't live without."
It is a Sony Handycam, a digital camcorder small enough to sit into the palm of the hand.
"This one is tiny, it's great," says Mickey, who makes lots of use of his gadget. "I like to take stuff backstage, and when we are on tour and things like that, so I have lots of stuff."
Despite its small size, the Handycam delivers high-quality pictures. "A lot of the stuff on You're A Star was shot with cameras like this, just hand-held cameras. You can make quite good quality TV with this at home."
Film
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Camcorders like this show how far digital technology and miniaturisation have come. Before the camcorder, home movies were limited by the technology available: film. Many of the cameras were bulky. Some even had to be wound up by hand. These used a clockwork mechanism.
There were electric home movie cameras, but these also suffered the limitations of shooting on film. Home movie film was expensive to purchase. Once shot, it had to be sent away for processing. Days or weeks later, the film would come back, all three minutes of it.
Then it had to be loaded into a projector to be viewed.
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Digital
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Digital camcorders have led to a huge increase in quality and decrease in cost for home movies. After shooting, the footage can be viewed instantly, either on the nearest TV or on the camera's built-in screen.
Then there are all the other advantages of a good camcorder. "It's almost got a brain of its own, this little yoke, because you don't have to worry about light or anything like that," says Mickey. "You can do lots of other things with it as well. One thing you can do is take still pictures." The stills can be loaded into a computer and have special effects added.
Because they are cheap and powerful, camcorders like this mean people can record more of their lives. Mickey used to go to songwriter weekends and capture how songs are written. He also has lots of backstage footage from You're A Star and Eurovision.
He laughs about turning it all into a blockbuster one day - when he has the time to edit it all. For now, though, "it's just nice to have memories in here."
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