Best Hard Drive Camcorder

[rthutchens]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a hard drive camcorder? I kinda prefer Sony, but JVC has much lower prices. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[rthutchens]

Any opinions?

 

[Goofyzgurl]

I just bought the JVC 20 G one for dh for xmas. I guess I should've did some research first though I just saw the right price and grabbed it. Well, off to read some reviews on Cnet.

 

[keishashadow]

We had a JVC mini dv that the sensors blew out while taping Fantasmic, shortly after the warranty had expired...I was left high & dry, would have cost more to fix than re-purchase same model.

Best Buy & Circuit City sales assoc told me it's a common problem with JVC models, I've never read anything about it when I was doing research pre-buy???

Anyway, I needed a new model but, didn't want the hard drive model because of the shorter recording time capability vs the mini dv tapes.

Got a Canon @ Circuit City on Black Friday, unadvertised special for under $200, seems fine to me.

good luck.

 

[alfredromero1975]

Subbing since interested in this.

 

[poohbear158]

I'm also looking for a camcorder, not necessarily a hard drive one. Here is a good website that I found for research:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/d/Reviews&level_b=Camcorder.htm

 

[musicdude]

We had a jvc that ended up dying after about 2 years. I took advantage of the Panasonic that Circuit City had for $149 this last Friday.

 

[JediMaster]

Use the web to search for reviews from camcorder reviewers from magazines and web sites. The First thing to search for in the reviews are LOW LIGHT Ratings! This will determine the quality of your videos. Ones that dont shoot well in low light will show up grainy and fuzzy. Battery life is second.I never trust salemens opinions on equipment , I believe they work on comission and will sell you the ones they make the most profit on. Hard drive units are less noisy , but do create more heat. As with anythin new , no one knows their reliablity. Mini-DV Camcorders have come along way and are more reliable. The tapes are cheap now and will still be there ,as with a HD camcorder crashes you will lose ALL video. Hope this helps

May the Force be with You!

 

[NeverBeen2DW]

these were just reviewed in the consumer reports magazine. I will try to come back and post the ratings. I want to buy one too so I will be back. Subscribing to the thread.

 

[poohj80]

We just bought the JVC 30GB Hard Drive Everio over the Sony. We chose the JVC not only due to price, but features, ease of use, and stated battery life (we know they usually never do as well as the label but the JVC was labeled for 2 hours more than the Sony). While looking over the models another cutomer volunteered that they have one and love it. We had done some reseach online and, even though the JVC didn't rate as high as the Sony in every category, we decided the difference wasn't worth the $200 difference in cost.

 

[ceroarty]

I have the JVC 20 GB one and love it. I took it to disney with me and it worked great. I would recommend getting the share station for it. I bought that off ebay. It makes the camera in my opinion even better. It is so eay to transfer into DVD's. We were also going to get the Sony but the saleman talked me out of it. He also loves Sony but says they are still working out the quirks on the hard drives. I guess only time will tell but for now I am loving it. Hope this helps.

 

[thaggie]

I bought the Sony 30gb hard drive. Defiantely the way to go!!!

I was convinvced I wanted the JVC, but in the end Sony won out. My last comcroder was a sony and I have never had any problems with it. Also, I knew that I would be doing alot of night shooting at Disney. Everyone I talked to said that Sony has the best nigth shooting. They invented it.

My videos from Disney came out great! I bought it at 9:30 pm on a Thursday night and was on the way to the airport at 5am on Friday. So its very easy to use!

From experience Sony is the way to go.

 

[MichelleB]

We just went did all of this the past few days! My DH spent hours upon hours researching and visiting stores to talk to various sales people to get different comments. We ended up going with the Sony 60MB. We felt the coloring was much better on the Sony and it was easier to use. Just our opinion, but you'll get many different ones as we learned.

 

[rthutchens]

Did anyone find the info on best hard drive camcorders on consumer reports?

 

[MichelleB]

We joined consumer reports online but it didn't have the most current info.

 

[brettb]

I have no first hand experience with any of them and have only briefly read up on them -- I thought I wanted one but discovered I didn't really (yet, at least).

But in my quick scan of reviews, the JVC's picture quality was not as good as other options.

One thing to consider is how important editing your footage and creating sophisticated projects is to you. (Not that I'm the video editing king.....) From what I've gathers, MPEG is rather inferior to the MiniDV format for producing edited videos. They're both lossy compression formats, but the compression ratio for MPEG is much higher than for MiniDV (i.e. MPEG is compressed more) and I think MiniDV is "frame-based" (i.e. every fram is compressed indivudually. MPEG stores a complete frame followed by a certain number of frames that depend on the previous frames). Apparently, MiniDV is a far better choice if you're going to be doing a lot of serious editing with splicing, dicing, fancy transitions, etc.. DVD and HD camcorders, however, are certainly more convenient (MiniDVD must be transferred to a computer in real time), especially for getting video clips up on your TV quickly.

I think technically there's no reason an HD camcorder couldn't give you the option of recording in MPEG or MiniDV format (the latter is a codec, not just a tape format). I'll be waiting for subsequent generations and falling prices....and for my wife to get over upgrading our Canon Digital Rebel to an XTi.