Camcorders- are the memory stick ones any good?
 

Off to the states for summer hols, usually take my camcorder as the kids are growing up so quick- but in the continual quest for things new and shiny I was wondering about the new breed of tapeless camcorders- the ones that record on to a memory stick.

does anyone have any experience of these?

Thanks in advance,
Simon ;)

I have a Panasonic that can record to tape or SD card. I don't use the SD card for video, just the occasional picture as the quality of the SD recorded video is little better than you would expect from digital camera (in otherwords pants). As I understand it SD memory is relatively slow and can't cope with hi-res high rate capture. There may be others out there that use different memory. Best thing to do is ask them to shoot a bit of video and play it back on a TV for you so you can compare.

I'm no boffin on this kind of stuff, but AFAIK the biggest limiting factor for tapeless video recording is lack of capacity.

You can get 1Gb SD cards, but you are going to struggle to get godo quality video of more than 1 hour on something of that size. Once its full you will either need a laptop with you to transfer the data off, or another SD card. For holidays you really need something that has large amounts of cheap removable storage, ie tapes.

I think there are some harddrive based recoders that are on/coming to the market. These are a lot better in terms of capacity.

Best get to a shop to see what they have. Play with it, then read up on it on the web. Then go back again and have another play :)

As a capacity comparison, when downloading video from my camcorder to PC, it runs at about 250 Mb per minute of video. So with a 1 Gb card, you'll get about 4 minutes at the quality of the tape. Seeing as a 250Mb card runs for about 30 mins, you get some idea of how compressed the video is to get it on to an SD card!

I'm sure I've read somewhere about a new JVC camcorder that takes a CF card. I'm pretty sure Dixons will have them, and would let you have a aplay, and even record some stuff and play it back. So would most decent camera shops, just don't go in on a saturday:D

When I was reading up on it, IIRC it said something about getting an hour's recording at the highest level of resolution available, onto an 8GB card.

Price seemed to be about £600 including the card, but a spare card won't be cheap, so yes, you'd need to download it onto something else, (HD MP3 player?) or onto your computer.

Alcazar

This is what you want ( amd me ! ) the JVC GZ-MC500, it is a 3ccd digital camera at dvd quality with no conversion needed so stick your movies straight on dvd and it does 5 mega pixel stills too with a 8-10 optical zoom too. Runs on 4GB ( 6GB and 8GB to follow soon ) microdrives and is very small too, not cheap thou, about £900, link http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio/

looks good but rather bulky, and if I have a bulge that size in my other pocket too I'll get talked about ;)

I went down the traditional route and bought a sony dsc-p1- at 'slightly bigger than a pack of cards' it should fit the bill nicely, although from my experience of its fore-runner P7 the tapes are rather expensive.....

Thanks for all the help and advice guys.

Simon :)

We have a Sanyo Xacti C4, cost about £200 on ebay. Records onto SD card.

Quality is obviously not as good as tape although perfectly acceptable for most home video applications. Bad light performance is poorish.

Size wise it is exceptional & at £200 uoi cannot realy go wrong.

We are very pleased with it as we were sick & tired of carrying around a relatively large camera.

kiwi