Hi I hope some of you guys can help , im looking in to buying a HD camcorder in the next month or so and basicaly would like to know what are best brands to go for and if someone has the unit what its like and if its any good, My price lmit is £300 buy would stretch if nescessery.

Thanks In Advance

Pete.

Im guessing your mean HDD camcorder (harddrive based) ?

HD (high definition) camcorders start at about £700.

-Chris

I mean High Def I recently saw the Aiptek 720P High def unit on QVC for £219.96 yes its SD memory card but im not worried about that I was wondering if this is any good, Im also trying to find the camera that was featured on QVC last weekend that was an exclusive to them but its not on there website.
Last edited by stargazer600 : 27-10-2007 at 20:42

Dont touch it with a barge pole.

You will get FAR better quality video with a £300 minidv camara.

-Chris

At this point im purley hunting and trying to find what I can get with my money I would like to stay with brands that have a history and not that I have never heard of. Thanks for the advice Chris if anyone knows of any decent mini dv cameras that dont cost the earth it would be greatly apreaciated.

Regards Pete

Sony and Panasonic have quite afew good minidv camaras in your price range.

Panasonic do some with three CCDs (one sensor for each colour), these have better defined colours and far less noise in the image than single CCD camaras.

Those "Aiptek" camaras which you were looking at use a single CMOS sensor, (as used in mobile phone camaras)... Quite simply, avoid anything that mentions CMOS.

-Chris

I can't give the definitive answer, but around £300 will give you several options from the mainstream brands. Look at Sony, Panasonic, JVC etc. Personally I would not be looking at DV but at an HDD camera. You can get a Sony 30 gig for around your budget. Provided you also have a PC to enable you to dump the video to its HDD then burn to DVD, I would suggest it is the way to go.

Incidentally, there are many expensive HD (High Def) cameras around. Very nice but how do you save the recordings to a medium that preserves the quality?

Eh?

Minidv is lossless quality video @ 35Mbps, (or 13GB per 60min tape).

HDD camcorders have 40GB hard drives, and record compressed video, using there "highest quality" settings @ 8.5Mbps.

I know which I would rather have.
They use HDV, although the tapes are physically compatible with minidv, they use MPEG2 compression. So video recorded in HDV wont play on standard minidv camcorders.

Still, ive seen video recorded with the sony FX1, and its excellent.

-Chris

Thanks for all the replys I might look in to a Hard Drive camera in the near future I dont really want anything to do with tape if I can help it. Can anyone remember what that QVC TSV was last weekend because it really caught my eye.

Regards Pete

I agree about the compression or otherwise and it is a valid point. I was making reference to the source not the recording however and to the fact that the mini DV cameras in the price range are not High Definition and that at present there is no real way of archiving an HD recording to a High Def recordable medium (i.e. Blu-ray or HD-DVD recorder at a sensible price)

I still dont get your point... The HDD camaras at this price point arent HD either ?

And you can fit 2 hours of 720p video in good quality on a standard DVD+R in h.264 format.

-Chris