Hi ppl, Im looking to buy a video camcorder for my birthday. But Im not sure which to get. Ive heard minidv cams are the best and easy to connect up to your computer, but whats with the DVD and HD cams? are they any good? Could I get a good camcorder for 300 hundred pound?
You will get the best quality from a video camera that uses the miniDV tape, but you need to purchase a firewire cable separately to capture from the video camera, to the computer. The firewire cable is well worth the money as you can capture as .avi (lossless quality) files. You don't buy a cheap firewire cable, though. Mine cost me about $37US. The video cameras that record to miniDVDs, and the video cameras that record to hard drives are also good. They just don't have as good quality as the miniDV tape camcorders. My Sony DCR-HC96 was $599US back in January. It has surpassed my expectations.
If you are going to do a lot of editing the best choice is still miniDV. This does not mean that DVD and HD cams are not good, but miniDV has the lowest compression so it is still the best quality. For 300 pounds, which is currently around $600 you can certainly get a decent camcorder. Check out http://www.camcorderinfo.com for reviews of various models. @GrandpaBW: There is realy no need to buy a very expensive Firewire cable: when it is not defective due to a manufacturing flaw it will work. You can buy Firewire cards including a cable for as low as $15 and there is no reason not to buy them. Just make sure that it carries proper warranty against manufacturing errors and buy in a shop that has a good service or decent money back guarantee
I have read a number of posts from folks who have used a low quality firewire cable and were wondering why the quality of their captures was low. They switched to a high quality firewire cable, and their problems went away. I did a lot of reading before I purchased my Handicam. The firewire cable posts that I read, convinced me to get a good cable. I had already seen the video quality differences between miniDV, miniDVD, and hard drive, so getting a miniDV camcorder was a no brainer. I don't have the need for High Definition, yet.
I fully agree with your statement about minDV. It is still the best quality with the biggest advantage that it has no temporal compression. This means that there is no need for recompressing of frames that are not altered. The only thing is that at the final step you need a good MPEG-2 encoder if you want to go to DVD. It is a petty that consumers tend to think that tape is old fashioned and digital storage on solid state memory or hard drives is a must. And unfortunately manufacturers respond to that and are moving away from tape. Anyway, I'd love to see a camcorder that records to hard drive in a format without temporal compression... I guess we have to wait a while for that if it ever hits the market. About Firewire cables: the transfer is a purely digital data transfer so it either works or it does not. You can not degrade the quality when using a Firewire transfer. If it works it works. If it does not work it is broken. This is quite different from for example cables and connectors for analog audio and video where the impendance of the cable, connectors and connections does make a difference. This is why e.g. gold plated connetors are applied in high quality connectors for analog signals.
The firewire cable is the weak link between the camcorder and PC. I paid $30 and got a gold plated one and have had no problems.
Take my word for it, a gold plated Firewire cable is absolute nonsense. It's like buying a gold plated USB cable. The only thing that is important is that the soldering between the cable and connector is properly done and rigid. Five years ago I bought a Firewire card plus cable for $14 and I plug it in an out almost daily. It still works without any problem... Peace ;-)
