Hi,

I am thinking of buying one of these.

Just wondering if anybody could recommend what to look out for.

I know nothing about them.

Budget is around £700.

i'm no expert on them but try and go for one that records straight onto mini dvd rather than tape. you can then easily pop it into your dvd player or your pc dvd rom and play/edit etc.

My brother got a digital straight to dvd camcorder for about 250 i think, i dont think you need to spend 700 quid on one, but if you do want to, you can get a proper class one for that price.

The Bri-Man is right. You can get a great DVD camcorder for under £300, but that little extra money will get you better quality.

How about this one for £651 : SONY DVD DCR-DVD505 camcorder + Memory Stick Duo PRO 512 Mb + VD-W28DE3 DVD-RW 8cm 60min./2.8Gb (pack of 3) + PIX carry all

Thanks for that. I am going on holiday in 2 months and want to buy a camcorder. Although I can record 3min clips on my IXUS 40. Quality is not all that good.

I'll have to check some more out.

For £700 you could get yourself a nice High Definition camera, and future proof yourself:

See here

Nooooooo! Don't do it. Don't fall for the marketing hype. It's not easy or advisable to edit from DVD's. If you're planning to edit your video, you're much better off getting a mini-DV camera and transferring via firewire to your computer.

Even if you're not going to edit them, you'd be better buying a mini-DV camera, and with the money you save, buy a DVD-Recorder, so you have a mini-DV master tape should anything happen to your DVD!

I'm fairly sure that camcorders that record direct to DVD will do so in MPEG. Native DV is going to be much better quality, so a mini-DV tape will have superior quality, and be of comparable cost. And even better quality at £700.

Isn't a camcorder with a hard drive better because you don't need mini dv tapes, or dvds?

But of limited capacity, and it would be relatively difficult to change a full hard drive. So it is probable, that to cut costs, and ensure that a reasonable amount can be recorded, it would also use compression such as mpeg.

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/...play.php?f=163


Last edited by Elbewasser : 30-08-2006 at 11:44

Definitely not. Imagine all your precious camcorder memories wiped out in an instant due to catastrophic hard drive failure! Not to mention that most of them either use MPEG2 or MPEG4 for compression, because DV-AVI takes up lots of space.

Seriously, there's no point arguing about it, tape based camcorders are the best, that's why professionals use them.

I wouldn't blow £700 on a camcorder unless it had features I needed. If you know nothing about camcorders you don't need a £700 one and you'd do fine, and get great pictures, on a £250 MiniDV camcorder from a decent manufacturer.

Thats just it, I was advised to spend around £500 plus if I wanted to get good quality video.

I am not making a epic or lord of the rings. But I do want good quality.

I think tape is good, its cheaper, I can always transfer to my PC via a cable and edit the vid using pinnacle studio.

Oh well the search continues.

if I can't decide, I'll just buy a 2GB card for my Canon IXUS 40 and use that for the time being. haha

I've got a Sony DCR-HC19e, bought it before christmas for £250, it records onto MiniDV tapes and the quality is awesome.

Don't go for DVD yet, it's not worth it, MiniDV is the way to go for digital video.

You can get the Sony HDR-HC3E for that money, that's Hi-Def recording.

Telly Man, what is the quality like? any chance of uploading a clip?..

I'll see what i can do, the quality is awesome though.

The DCR-HC24e replaced mine.

Thanks.

I want to buy one before I leave, if the price is right.

I know you measure picture quality on cameras in megapixels, but how do you tell the quality of camcorders. Pardon my ignorance in advance.

I think it has something to do with a CCD. The better this is, the better the video quality.

The lens will play a big part, if not THE biggest part.

Crap lens + good CCD, still = Crap Picture.

You measure resolution in megapixels not quality. Sadly marketing and slow brains mean this has become a widely accepted myth. Particularly damaging when it comes to the burgeoning dSLR market.

I'm looking for a camcorder for under £300 but don't really know what i'm looking for specs wise.

Any MiniDV camcorder by Sony or JVC should be spot on. Canon tend to be good, but the drive mech is noisy and can be picked up by the microphone!