In discussing the different types of camcorders with members and other video users I used to advocate tape as in Mini DV over the newer formats such as Hard Drives and DVDs. I would argue that tape was better than a hard drive because if you run out of tape you can quickly change to a new one whereas with a hard drive camera you have to upload your video to a computer and then erase. (Of course you have to shoot a lot of video to fill up a hard drive.) And I would argue that tape was better than DVD because DVD footage is harder to convert into a version usable in your editor. There are also the newer flash memory based camcorders in which you can swap out memory cards but they are expensive and so you can't keep them as archives.
Recently I got to work with a client's hard drive based Hi Def camera. I was interested to note that while the camera's hard drive shows up as an icon on your desktop, there are no visible files of video clips. The only way to capture video is to use an editor. The whole process is similar to and as time-consuming as capturing from tape. I was hoping that if I was in a hurry I could simply drag the clip files to a folder which would be relatively quick and deal with them later. So one of the hoped for advantages of the hard drive camcorder doesn't exist. Of course I didn't have that much time to explore this system so maybe there are some tricks I don't know about.
I will say this about the camera; the quality of the images was amazing.
But just today I came across a review in the VideoMaker newsletter of a Canon tape based camcorder that gave me a new insight. The key statement:
"It uses the trusty Mini DV tape. This makes it a bit bigger than some of its cousins, but it also makes the playback quality better as well. Let's face it: AVCHD cameras still don't pump as much information through to their Flash cards and hard drives as good old HDV cameras do to tape."
So here is one more reason to consider tape over the other formats. The image quality is still better!
If I were going to buy a general purpose HD camera today I would still go with tape. If my camera needed to be withstand a lot of abuse I would go for flash memory so there would be no moving parts to go wrong. I suppose a hard drive camera might be useful if I wanted to set up a surveillance system.
I can't think of a reason why I would want to buy a DVD camcorder. I think they appeal mostly to users who want to shoot and share without editing. Video the kids and ship the disk of to grandma who has a DVD player. Even here the internet is making that approach obsolete. Now people post the footage on YouTube and grandma can view it on her iPhone!
Erick
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