camcorders

[harleyrider]

Kind of not a Rv type question.I am looking to upgrade to a newer camcorder.Mine isn`t really that old but compared to the size of todays camcorders-I feel like i`am carrying around a suit case.
Any body have the newer ones that play mini DVD`s.Your thoughts???

[OntMont]

I have a Panasonic, it is a couple of years old now, so it is probably obsolete. You can do a lot more with the digital images than with analog tape, e.g. extract single frames to use as a still photo, mine will produce a 1 Megapixel still, not great by digital camera standards, but the image is fine for posting on the web or sending as an email attachment for screen viewing. If you really get into it, there is software available for complex editing. You can move segments around, delete bits in the middle and generaly make a neat job out of a lot of clips taken at an event like a wedding for example. If you are going to get a new video camera, I would not get anything but a digital one. (not sure that you can even buy analog tape ones anymore).

[thook]

We have the Hitachi digital with the mini dvd. Takes great video and pretty good stills. I like the dvd versus tape because access to clips is much easier than with tape. The clips are indexed using thumbnails of the start of each clip and you can select the one you want for playback much like you would use a computer. Editing is easy and there are tons of software available for editing. The small size is great too.

[harleyrider]

I was at "Best Buys" today just looking at camcorders and talking to one of the sales guys.He told me that the mini dvd`s only have a recording time of 30 minutes.For me anyway that is not long enough,does this sound right???They had one camcorder can`t remember what brand it was,but it recorded on a 20 gig hard drive right in the camcorder.he said at the highest quality setting it had a record time of 4 1/2 hours.I take it you plug into a PC download the video and burn to a DVD.It was the only one that had this feature.It also was very small.

[Dave e Victoria]

Last spring I bought a new still camera that has excellent video built in. In fact, I wanted an SLR but stayed with this because of the video feature. The camera is the Olympus 7070. It will capture a couple of minutes of video at a time in 30fps. The only thing you can't do is change the zoom while shooting. The good part of that is I no longer make annoying zooms. This camera is good enough that I rarely get out my digital camcorder anymore.
Dave

[thook]

On our camera with the mini dvd's it does have a 30 minute maximum but that is on each side of the disc. As I recall, the rerecordable discs were about $7-$8 each. We have 4 of them and when we have the time we download our recordings to our computer and then edit and burn them to recordable full size dvd's. Even on long trips 4 hours of recording time has been more than enough.

[harleyrider]

quote:Originally posted by thook

On our camera with the mini dvd's it does have a 30 minute maximum but that is on each side of the disc. As I recall, the rerecordable discs were about $7-$8 each. We have 4 of them and when we have the time we download our recordings to our computer and then edit and burn them to recordable full size dvd's. Even on long trips 4 hours of recording time has been more than enough.

Thats a good point.never really thought about both sides.I take it switching the mini dvd over to the other side and continue recording takes what?Maybe 5 seconds.I can live with that.So I really wouldn`t lose much video if I was recording a wedding or such.