Mrs. Roberts and I are looking to invest in a new camcorder for our growing family. We never had one yet, but there have been many silly dog moments that we’ve wanted to capture. With a baby soon to arrive, this will only continue.
We’re interested in one that has a good picture inside and outside, will be easy to use and we can link to the computer (to probably use to record the video onto DVD or VCD.) From doing a little looking and reading online, most people like Sony the best. The Sony website led me to be interested in the DCR-TRV460 (a Digital Hi8 camcorder) which is about $400. I don’t want to spend much more than this.
Do you have this or a similar camcorder?? What do you like/dislike about it?? What accessories would I have/want to buy?? Are there similar or better camcorders out there for this price?? etc…
I have a Mini-DV digital camcorder by JVC. I don’t use it a lot but when I have it has worked very well.I would make sure that it is digital recording. You will more than likely need a larger battery too as the one supplied is usually small. I had to buy a larger 2 hour battery. Look for USB or Firewire connections to make transfer to the PC easy. You will need to invest in some video software to edit the recordings. They are fun though once you get over the learning curve.
I bought a Mini-DVD JVC Digital camcorder several months ago. It came with a firewire connector built-in, and it connected to my Sony PC (which has a Firewire port and capture software) just fine. I’ll second the comment about getting a larger battery - my JVC came with one that was only good for one hour.
A second comment - if you transfer your video to a PC, the files that result are huge. An AVI of an hour of video chewed up 13GB on my PC, and converting that AVI file down to MPEG2 format only got the storage requirement down to 2GB.
Finally, this has nothing to do with your original question bit I’ll say it anyway. Take lots of movies! An hour-long mini-DVD tape costs less than $10, and twenty years from now those movies you’ve made will be priceless. We’ve been taking movies of the kids since we bought a VHS camcorder eighteen years ago. The movies didn’t seem like much at the time (and in fact the VHS tapes sat on a shelf for many years), but we’ve just converted everything to DVDs and started watching them again and they are beyond price.
The Sony does have firewire and USB connections for downloading to my PC. Thanks for the info about how much storage it takes. I didn’t think about it and I’ll probably need to upgrade my HD. I’ve only got about 3 GBs of free space right now.
