i saw the jvc camcorder with 30gb, up to 10 hours of video recording. i can't imagine why one would want to record to a mini-dvd or mini-dv, even if they could be reused. you can only store up to 30 minutes of video on a mini-dvd and 60 minutes of video on a mini-dv. it's like using a small cup to carry water from a stream. why not use a bucket?! (water=data, cup=mini-dvd). if you wanted to show someone a video you took while you were out recording, you could play it from your camcorder without the worry that your memory is almost full. if i want to play a video for people on a tv, i'd either directly hook up the video camcorder to the tv or burn a full sized 2 hour dvd (or a 4 hour double layer dvd if they ever come down in price). so, what i want to know is whether panasonic (similar model to pv-gs300) or sony (similar model to dcr-dvd405) will be coming out with the large harddrive in the near future? also, a rep from best buy told me it wasn't possible to delete video scenes from a digital camcorder mini-dvd/dv. is this true? can you delete from a harddrive? i sure would think so. btw, i don't consider rewinding and re-recording the same thing as deleting. thank you very much for your helpful input. scott i'm sorry if this topic has already been discussed, but i checked the first few pages of threads and all i could find was people asking for help on what camcorder to buy or how to use the camcorder they bought.
Just my two cents: I'm convinced that the future for camcorders will be in the use of solid state memory or hard drives and in the next year you will see many models appearing on the market using that technology. However, there are a couple of considerations apart from the only aspect that you mention (being able to record up to 30 hours without worrying that you run out of storage capacity): 1. hard drive or memory card camcorders use MPEG-2 (or sometimes MPEG-4) as video format. This is still more compressed than DV uses in minDV tapes and therefor less quality. 2. Editing MPEG-2 is still quite difficult. And if you do edit it, the quality will degrade. Many people underestimate the importance of editing. But how many people have footage lying around and never watch it because it is just plain boring, like 5 minute shots of kids playing in the garden...;-) 3. Tapes are still a very reliable way of backing up data, which is proved by the fact that most companies still use tape to make daily back-ups from their important data. 4. Don't overestimate the importance to be able to record up to 30 hours in one go. First of all the battery will not last that long, so you will have to stop to recharge. An average consumer will take the camcorder on holiday and will shoot in a two weeks holiday maybe 2 hours. This is two miniDV tapes... if he shoots more, he certainly wants to do a lot of editing and then will be faced with the issue ad mentioned under 2.
