Buying a Camcorder - What you need to know
Buying a Camcorder - What you need to know
Before you consider the camcorder features you need you must decide which type of storage or capture method is best for your intended purpose. The days of VHS and Hi8 tapes are gone. These were analog capture systems that had problems such as drop-outs, stretch and loss of resolution with each generation of copy. Along came digital capture - a sturdier and more reliable capture media with phenomenal advantages for editing and archiving. Currently, there are four types of digital storage: Digital Tape, DVD, Hard Drive and Flash. All of these capture methods represent a quantum leap forward.
Digital Video Tape
MiniDV is far superior to analog tape. It is a very versatile, high quality recording format enabling transfer via IEEE 1394 (also known as Fire Wire and I-link) and because it is recorded digitally onto tape it can be edited without signal loss. This format was a big improvement over analog formats such as Video8, Hi8, VHS and VHS-C.
MiniDV has become a standard for home and semi-professional video production. At present, it offers the highest quality of any of the recordable storage types. However, tape does have some short comings - it is sensitive to moisture, strong magnetic fields, can break and requires real time transfers to a computer for storage or editing.
DVD
DVD (digital video disk) is a consumer format removable disk that can be played back on most home DVD players and computer DVD drives. The DVD disks used in camcorders are small 8-cm disks which are sometimes referred to as MiniDVDs. They are relatively cheap, can be played back in Blu-ray players and are a handy back-up media that can be stored separately from the camcorder - direct archiving. On the down side, recorded at the highest quality the disks only holds 20 to 30 minutes of video per side for a total recording length of one hour.
HDVD and Blu-ray disks...
