alcazar

iTrader: (2)

A recent thread on camcorders piqued my interest again and having some spare time in Leicester yesterday, I had a look at some Sony ones.

I was amused at just how small they were, and how low the prices are now.

A friend who takes a LOT of video didn't buy a hard disk one though, although asking him why elicited the responnse that "I've never seen anyone else using one, so I didn't buy one"

So........does anyone have one and can comment on the pros and cons?

Alcazar

corradoboy

I've not got one, and never had any other type of camcorder. When I looked at one recently the main drawback I considered was if you needed to shoot a lot of footage with no means of archiving. With tape/disc units you simply swap out the media, once the HDD is full, it's full. I also think flash memory units will take over very soon, allowing more storage and media swap-out, faster recording resulting in higher definition and smaller machines still with longer battery life. Like all technology, they can already do them, but drip-feed it to us so that every few years many feel the need to upgrade to the new device.

KiwiGTI

Tape is still the best, I believe the HDD and DVD ones (which are rubbish btw) use compression too much.

boomer

I believe that hard drive camcorders (and also the Sony MicroDV format) record directly to MPEG.

This means that it takes a "full frame" picture, but the next dozen or so are simply the differences since the full frame was taken. Thus typically every half a second a proper picture is taken, but filling in the bits in-between loses information/picture quality.

Normal MiniDV camcorders use MJPEG, which records every single frame, so the quality is higher. Also, editing is easier/better, because you can step through each frame one-by-one, rather than having to reconstruct the intermediate frames.

mb

Iwan

I've got a Sony DCR SR-190 HDD camcorder. I've only owned it a few weeks but it seems pretty good so far. I was using it most of today at the Fairford Airshow and it performed pretty well, I did get one error though. I'd been filming a Eurofighter for about 6 minutes and it suddenly stopped filming and the message "Buffer Overflow" appeared on the screen and then went away again. It worked fine again for the next 3 hours so maybe it was a one-off?

Connecting up to a PC afterwords is easy, you can burn DVDs straight from the camcorder using your PCs drive, or you can dump the files to your PC and edit them first before creating the DVD afterwards - which is what I do.

I like it, but then it's the first camcorder I've owned.

DemonDave

iTrader: (13)

just got the panny hdc-sd1 - uses avchd

pain in the *** to convert to avi or mpeg - but when it does, it blows away the video I recorded before on my high spec sony dv camcorder.

does not record on to HD but onto to 4g SD (or 8gb) - I was unsure of how it would look but after reading the reviews - I took the plunge

the panny has 3 ccd which also makes a difference and I now convert footage to wmv HD codecs

I was going to get the new sony sd one but after seeing the footage from the sd1 there was no competition. T3 also rated it

have a look here - SimplyDV Review: Panasonic HDC-SD1 AVCHD 3CCD High Definition video camera

GUNNER

I've got one you just stick mini disc in and format it (easy) then film ,take it out straight into dvd player and watch it. Sorted!!

KiwiGTI

This looks pretty good :

SimplyDV Review: Canon HV20 HDV / DV Camcorder

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Wouldn't buy a Canon camcorder, I know too many folk who have had them and had AWFUL quality control problems

Alcazar