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General discussion

What type of camcorder should I buy???

May 27, 2006 2:03AM PDT

I have had a sony HI -8 for the lst 7 years. Now that I am tranfering all my family videos to DVD I am realizing how bad the quality is. I plan to buy a new camcorder this year but am unsure of which technology to go with. I am mostly concerned with the quality I will get when I record to my dvd recorder. Also any other features you might know of that my old hi-8 doesnt have. DVD vs. mini dv??

thanks for the help.

aaron

Discussion is locked

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It depends
May 27, 2006 6:54AM PDT

It really depends on what you want to do with your camcorder.
If you want to shoot, finalize your disc and pop it in the dvd player, a dvd camcorder may be the way to go.

If you plan to edit your footage on the computer, a mini-dv is the way to go.

In general, a mini-dv is better than a dvd camcorder.
Mini-dv is uncompressed digital video. Dvd camcorders compress the video into Mpeg-2 for dvd.
Of course, to put your final product on dvd, it has to be compressed anyway, but you have more control over that with mini-dv. There are a great deal of editing and dvd authoring programs available. Many of them give you control over the compression for dvd.
Dvd camcorders usually just have a generic "good", "better", "best" option. They also compress on the fly, which is much more difficult.

Since you are talking about using your stand alone dvd recorder, a mini-dv would make more sense. Why record to dvd, then output to dvd??

Hope this doesn't make it more confusing.

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don't get a DVD camera. john
Jul 14, 2006 1:34PM PDT