Video Forums

olley · Campsite DB Admin

Hi Guys looking at buying a video camera and need some advice. First whats the best recording medium? Tape, CD or HDD

Next can you recommend a camera, needs to be simple to use, price up to about £400-£500.

Olley

SandJ · Specs DB Admin

Olley
Only advice I can give is avoid Samsung disc type, have had a lot of returns problems.

Steve

Pusser

springer

Hi Oily

If you're looking for a video camera I can recommend the Sony DCR-SR50. I've had mine for a couple of months and found it superb. It has a 30 GB HDD giving up to 20 hours recording,touch screen operation,decent battery life and excellent picture quality. All the bells and whistles!

I used it last on a visit to Duxford IWM and was amazed at the quality of picture and sound, both indoors and out.

Best gadget i've bought for years! If I remember rightly it cost about £430.00

Good luck

Dave

Spacerunner

Before you buy make sure that you will have a willing audience to view the results. Otherwise all your filming will be totally in vain. I'm only half joking, my video camera tends to gather a lot of dust.

doc_cam

It depends entirely on what your intended use is - you can use a Ferrari to go to the corner shop, or a C-Reg Fiesta (no offence intended to fiesta owners!). Your budget is middle-range, so you are unlikely to get a new range-topping hard drive videocam for that price: if you want a videocam to essentially take with on holiday and record watchable footage which you can edit fairly easily on computer, then look at Canon, Sony and Panasonic's Mini -DV cams. The old formats Video-8 and Hi-8 aren't available new anymore and probably best avoided unless you are given one - they can produce great results but editing is a bit more complicated and repairs could be tricky as time moves on.

I use a Panasonic DS5 and a CanonXL1 - both Mini DV models with excellent results, the Panasonic is small and probably more what you want, but the Canon is simply stunning in quality due to its 3CCD sensor (most cheaper cams only have 1 CCD). Theyare both defunct as models now, but there are similar ones in both ranges. Both these camcorders are over 7 years old now, but still superb, and touch wood, have never required attention or repair. The HDD cams are very new and need a bit of time to iron out teething problems, and the DVD recording ones are in my opinion a bit of a gimmick also best avoided due to the format wars - not all DVDs are readable in all players as pointed out, and with BluRay and HD DVD fighting it out there will be changes to DVD standards you can bet on it.