Help with buying a cam.....

[Hatebreed]

Looking at buying a camcorder for family use and maybe to record a show or two in the summer .

My knowledge is um knowledgeless, any help to push me in the right direction would be great.

My only needs is that it is small, has good battery life and good clear pic quality (which probably means HD)

Cheers for any help.....

[Bob Garage]

all I'll say is don't go cheap (even with HD cams)

We bought our eldest a cam for her birthday last year. she only wanted it to put videos up on youtube and the like.

picked up a toshiba (which claims to be HD) for £150. Its shit. picture is crap for something that claims to be HD. Infact if I got the picture quality on a SD cam I;d be disapointed. but she likes it and it serves her purpose.

But, if you want a good quality one you need to make a good investment (£££)

[Hatebreed]

all I'll say is don't go cheap (even with HD cams)

We bought our eldest a cam for her birthday last year. she only wanted it to put videos up on youtube and the like.

picked up a toshiba (which claims to be HD) for £150. Its shit. picture is crap for something that claims to be HD. Infact if I got the picture quality on a SD cam I;d be disapointed. but she likes it and it serves her purpose.

But, if you want a good quality one you need to make a good investment (£££)

Cheers for the advice Tim, Had a feeling it was going to be costly!!

[maidencolorado]

What's your budget?

My advice, stay away from Hard Drive cammies. They are fine for family use, and have some nice advantages for that use. But if you plan to use it for concerts as well, you'll likely find it is more trouble than it is worth.

Most likely, you'll need to pick up an extended life battery, as only one of my 5 cammies has a decent battery life to the original one it came with. Even then, I picked up an extra, longer life battery. When shopping for the new battery, look online, you'll be able to find one much cheaper than in a store.

[Hatebreed]

What's your budget?

My advice, stay away from Hard Drive cammies. They are fine for family use, and have some nice advantages for that use. But if you plan to use it for concerts as well, you'll likely find it is more trouble than it is worth.

Most likely, you'll need to pick up an extended life battery, as only one of my 5 cammies has a decent battery life to the original one it came with. Even then, I picked up an extra, longer life battery. When shopping for the new battery, look online, you'll be able to find one much cheaper than in a store.

Budget wise £250 -£300.

Cheers

[maidencolorado]

I'll bow out with that info, as I'm in the US. I could look around here to see what you could get in that range, but you'd probably be better helped with information from the likes of people who wouldn't be looking primarily at NTSC units.

I know here, I could find a fairly nice unit in that budget (in fact I did earlier today). I believe (though I'm known to be wrong pretty often) that Simon_LDT got his second hand, though I'm not sure what he paid. I've gone second hand on 3 of mine, and they have all worked well.

[Cjlcooter]

What's your budget?

My advice, stay away from Hard Drive cammies. They are fine for family use, and have some nice advantages for that use. But if you plan to use it for concerts as well, you'll likely find it is more trouble than it is worth.

Most likely, you'll need to pick up an extended life battery, as only one of my 5 cammies has a decent battery life to the original one it came with. Even then, I picked up an extra, longer life battery. When shopping for the new battery, look online, you'll be able to find one much cheaper than in a store.

hi what's the problem with a hard drive camera?.. please tell us why we should stay away from those hard drive cameras,on a side note the new JVC Everio 1080p HD camera is 30% smaller (no eye piece) but it looks like they out class alot of other HD cameras because of its 20x optical zoom! and it is around $699 USD it has a 60 gig HDD and also for another $100 USD $799 you can have a 120 gig HDD instead.

edited to show it what do other think about it this is one i was looking at.

JVC GZ-HD300 Everio High Definition 60 gig Hard Disk Camcorder (Onyx Black)
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8049843959


JVC GZ-HD300 Everio High Definition 120 gig Hard Disk Camcorder (Onyx Black)
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8049842719



Cj

[sjmike]

There seems to a problem with the HDD cams when recording in a warm environment with a lot of bass, the hard drive can't write the data fast enough, gets an overflow and just stops. In this case you need to wait until the camera has recovered the data, finished writing it and then start recording again, which it doesn't automatically, but has to be done manually... ergo, you lose some seconds, or maybe even longer if the cam takes longer to write.

Same thing happened with Jake's recording and quite a few others I know who have HDD cameras. The hard drive buffer can't keep up and freezes the video.

[Metfan72]

There seems to a problem with the HDD cams when recording in a warm environment with a lot of bass, the hard drive can't write the data fast enough, gets an overflow and just stops. In this case you need to wait until the camera has recovered the data, finished writing it and then start recording again, which it doesn't automatically, but has to be done manually... ergo, you lose some seconds, or maybe even longer if the cam takes longer to write.

Same thing happened with Jake's recording and quite a few others I know who have HDD cameras. The hard drive buffer can't keep up and freezes the video.

So the consensus seems to be Flash Memory. You know it's funny because yesterday at Future Shop, the guy recommended one with Flash Memory because he was saying people were having trouble with the Hard Drive cams.

He did not get into specifics, just thought that for my use it would be better to get a Flash Memory instead or Hard Drive.

[Cjlcooter]

There seems to a problem with the HDD cams when recording in a warm environment with a lot of bass, the hard drive can't write the data fast enough, gets an overflow and just stops. In this case you need to wait until the camera has recovered the data, finished writing it and then start recording again, which it doesn't automatically, but has to be done manually... ergo, you lose some seconds, or maybe even longer if the cam takes longer to write.

Same thing happened with Jake's recording and quite a few others I know who have HDD cameras. The hard drive buffer can't keep up and freezes the video.

i thought jake said the problem was with the cheap mic on the JVC Everio camera i bet if you get a external mic maybe you will not have any problems, but you would think that the new High Def camcorders would have fixed that problem if the HDD was the cause of the recording to be stopped i guess i do not know we can only go from other peoples experiences.

Cj