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General discussion

Advise on a hard drive camcorder.

Apr 2, 2006 12:41AM PST

What are your feelings on the hard drive camcorders? Do you own one? what are the pros and cons? I would like to purchase one for around $1,000 U.S. What would be a good camera for that price? I was almost set on buying the Jvc Everio series but read the video quality is not very good. Can anyone recommend a good hard drive camcorder?

Thanks,
Denyel

Discussion is locked

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Hard drive cams
Apr 2, 2006 12:49AM PST

My feeling is that they are not very good.
If you've read that the video quality is not very good, why spend $1000 on one??

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video quality
Apr 2, 2006 1:19AM PST

I only read that the video quality was not good in the Everio series. Thats why I have not chosen that camera. I was hopeing that there would be another camera from a different company that is a great camera in my price range.

Denyel

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Hard drive
Apr 2, 2006 1:32AM PST

Sony just came out with one. Check that one out.
Why are you stuck on hard drive camcorders??

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There are good hard drive cameras, but not in your price
Apr 2, 2006 8:14AM PDT

range. The lower priced units, under about $3-5,000, record a compressed form of video on the hard drive. They do this so that they can record for a respectable length of time. The result is several problems. What do you do with it after it's recorded? You've got to get it to the computer (one problem), and then burn it to DVD (second problem). The compressed form of the file means that inferior results are produced if you edit the video (third problem). It also means that the sole, permanent repository for the video is the DVD (fourth problem) since you are unlikely to keep the file on either the camera's or the computer's hard drive.

That's why many stick with mini-DVs.

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Touche
Apr 14, 2006 1:07PM PDT

Hard Drive camcorders use MPEG-2 ZCompression, which uses 1 in 15 keyframes, while the rest are just compression based off of that. It is a pain to edit too. Mini DV is inly intraframe compression, so no quality is lost.