If you only had $300 - $400 to spend on a camcorder, what would you buy?
I’m trying to help my sister out. She was supposed to have been researching this and has not, so I thought I would ask you guys.
She wanted to know whether the kind that use mini discs are any good, any thoughts on those?
There are three types.
Some record on to tapes. Some record on to small-size DVDs. Some record on to a hard drive inside the camera.
The ones that record on to tapes deliver the best picture quality. However, you might think that tapes are old-fashioned, and even though it’s a digital signal going on to the tape, it’s still tape, which can get chewed up, damaged, unspooled or whatever. Think back to every bad experience you ever had with cassette tape. Plus, you’re constantly worrying about having enough tape, changing tapes, looking after tapes, keeping track of which tapes you’ve recorded on and which you haven’t… and so on.
The ones that record on the small DVDs are best for convenience, because obviously you can just take the DVD out of the camera and straight into your playback device, whether it’s the DVD drive of your computer (for editing or transfer) or your domestic DVD player that’s plugged into your TV. However, these recordable small-format DVDs are a relatively expensive recording medium, and they don’t provide very long recording duration, so you’re changing them more often. Picture quality not as good as tapes.
The ones that record on to an internal hard drive can generally record for at least 10-12 hours (depending on the quality setting you’ve chosen) and then you can hook it up to your computer to download all the data. Obviously, until you download, you are limited to the recording capacity of the internal hard drive. Picture quality same as for small format DVDs. On the other hand, the recording duration capacity is good enough for most people, most of the time, and you aren’t changing disks or tapes.
If high picture quality is your top priority, it has to be tapes. If you can live with ‘good enough’ picture quality, it’s your choice between limitless recording capacity but having to swap in a new DVD every 60 minutes, or a limited hard disk capacity that gives you 10-14 hours recording on a good setting.
I had to make this choice just recently, and opted for a camera with an internal hard disk. I bought a latest model Sony Handycam. The internal hard drive is 60 GB, which in theory can provide up to 40 hours recording, although in practice and on a high quality setting it’s actually more like 14 hours.
In terms of brands, you can’t really go wrong with either JVC, who pioneered this technology and lead the field, and Sony. I haven’t used any JVC equipment. The Sony Handycam has been a perfect piece of kit in all respects, and I love it. I literally can’t fault it. However, Sony kit tends to cost more than comparable JVC kit.
I’m not a great one for brand loyalty, but I do tend to favour Panasonic when it comes to electrical items and fun technology. I’ve bought many Panasonic items over the years, and always been perfectly satisfied. However, this market is not one where I feel Panasonic offer the best buys. They do make camcorders, but I think either JVC or Sony have the edge.
This is the age of internet shopping and there are many sites that promise to help you find the cheapest deal. This can be good, but let’s remember: cheapest isn’t always best, and cheap is often cheap for a reason. A camcorder is a substantial investment. Even though I usually shop online, in this case I would suggest actually buying from a good retailer who will help you make a good choice. If anything goes wrong, you have your receipt and whatever after-sales care the store offers, and you can get something done. Camcorders are brilliant pieces of technology, but that are by their nature also prone to developing temperamental faults. I’d say buy one from somewhere you can go back to if you have any problems or if you just want a bit of help understanding how to use it.
Um… removable flash memory??
Another important consideration is how you are going to edit the video.
If you are using a Mac, you want to get a camcorder that uses “DV” format. The ones that record to DVD record the data in a format that is a hassle to work with in iMovie, although it can be done.
Thanks for the suggestions. My sister ended up buying Sony DVD Camcorder for $299 that was usually a $400 or more camcorder.
Hopefully, that will do her for a while.
I’m actually doing pre-purchase research for this right now.
Can you recommend a good camera, preferably with removable flash storage (or failing that an HDD) that will result in video files that are easily workable on a Mac?
We just bought an Elura 100. Pretty nice, inexpensive camera. They are discontinued, but you can still find New In Box stock at some of the closeout places on the web.
What kind of Mac? I understand that the slot-in drives on Mac laptops will not accept the small 8-cm discs (DVDs, CDs, etc. I don’t think they will accept DVD-RAM discs either, of any size, which some camcorders and video recorders use.