jill1420

Looking to buy new camcorder. Can anyone tell me the pros and cons re. disc or built in hard drives. There doesnt seem to be much difference in price. Currys have got a deal on a hard drive JVC with 58hr storage for £345 ish. and you can buy a separate piece of equipment (cant remember name) to down load onto disc for £78 (thats a half price deal) if you buy them together. Is it any better than just using your laptop to copy? Any replies appreciated me and hubby not technical minded.

P2L

Hi Jill
Are you looking at coming out to NZ soon?? If so, I would do your homework now, look at which or the specialist sites and then decide whats the best you can afford for your dosh, and buy it at the airport duty free from Currys, or if travelling East Singapore, Hongkong and KL have fab shops at the airport lots cheaper. But in our experience, you can't go wrong with Sony.

jill1420

Doh!...................never even thought about duty free. Hoping to be heading out in January. Thanks for your reply.

cypherpunk

Pro: there are fewer mechanical tape drive parts and tapes to stuff up, and the cameras can be smaller and less fragile.

Con: you end up with very large files that have to be managed, written to DVD etc. The hard disk in the camera has limited storage (depending on quality) and once it's full it has to be offloaded somewhere. With digital tape cameras you can just pop another tape in. But many camcorder users only ever take a few dozen hours of footage anyway, and at good quality you can get about 10 hours on the hard disk camcorders. The "50 hours" quoted figure will be for horrible blocky-vision video.

If you rarely end up with more than an hour or so of footage from a holiday or outing, and you have a PC with lots of disk space for managing the files, then an HD camcorder will be fine, but if you need to shoot for longer without worrying about running out of space and you want good quality video than a MiniDV tape-based one would be better and probably cheaper.

The JVC Sharestation accessory is for burning video off the camera directly to DVD. You can do without this if you use a PC but it is more convenient.

I really can't see the appeal of DVD-based camcorders, other than the fact that you can play the disc directly in (some) DVD players so you don't need to transfer it or plug the camcorder into the TV. DVDs are fragile and the ones that you use in camcorders are expensive; not the sort of thing you want to be bothering with while travelling.

These days with high-capacity SD cards getting cheaper you can also consider flash-based cameras as these combine cheap-ish removable media and easy transfers with small size and durability.

jill1420

Thanks for taking the time to reply...................great advice Will reread and absorb info. ta