dv, hard-drive, dvd, tape?

[Lemmonie]

camcorder. need a very cheap one to video kids whilst they are tiny. but what format?

[valve bounce66]

if you want a cheap one its got to be DV.a new one is under £100.

[clonmult]

valve bounce66 said:

if you want a cheap one its got to be DV.a new one is under £100.

Also depends on what sort of quality you want, and how easy you want to archive them.

You can get some pretty reasonable SDHC based ones from around £150, and then you only need to drag/drop the files from the memory card to your PC.

DV can be good, but its a load of messing around to archive videos off onto the PC/DVD.

[jon-]

clonmult said:

valve bounce66 said:

if you want a cheap one its got to be DV.a new one is under £100.

Also depends on what sort of quality you want, and how easy you want to archive them.

You can get some pretty reasonable SDHC based ones from around £150, and then you only need to drag/drop the files from the memory card to your PC.

DV can be good, but its a load of messing around to archive videos off onto the PC/DVD.

Good advice, I'd try and get a SDHC system as it makes archiving data to the PC (almost) as simple as drag and drop. (the almost was in reference to codecs which are sometimes a bit tricky)

[Road2Ruin]

jon- said:

clonmult said:

valve bounce66 said:

if you want a cheap one its got to be DV.a new one is under £100.

Also depends on what sort of quality you want, and how easy you want to archive them.

You can get some pretty reasonable SDHC based ones from around £150, and then you only need to drag/drop the files from the memory card to your PC.

DV can be good, but its a load of messing around to archive videos off onto the PC/DVD.

Good advice, I'd try and get a SDHC system as it makes archiving data to the PC (almost) as simple as drag and drop. (the almost was in reference to codecs which are sometimes a bit tricky)

Definately SDHC if you want cheap and simple. Most record in MPEG2 format so no problems with playback on another machine and also easy to convert to DVD. Make sure you get a dedicated SDHC card reader as that makes copying to the computer easier that plugging the camcorder in. Panasonic do some nice SDHC camcorders, very compact and quite reasonable.

[clonmult]

Road2Ruin said:

jon- said:

clonmult said:

valve bounce66 said:

if you want a cheap one its got to be DV.a new one is under £100.

Also depends on what sort of quality you want, and how easy you want to archive them.

You can get some pretty reasonable SDHC based ones from around £150, and then you only need to drag/drop the files from the memory card to your PC.

DV can be good, but its a load of messing around to archive videos off onto the PC/DVD.

Good advice, I'd try and get a SDHC system as it makes archiving data to the PC (almost) as simple as drag and drop. (the almost was in reference to codecs which are sometimes a bit tricky)

Definately SDHC if you want cheap and simple. Most record in MPEG2 format so no problems with playback on another machine and also easy to convert to DVD. Make sure you get a dedicated SDHC card reader as that makes copying to the computer easier that plugging the camcorder in. Panasonic do some nice SDHC camcorders, very compact and quite reasonable.

Very compact, in fact almost too small. I was torn between a Panasonic and a Toshiba, but the Tosh won me over - £170 vs £220+, with 1080p versus DVD resolution. The Toshiba (H20 Camileo?) also has HDMI output on it as well, so you can plug it direct into the TV.

And if you want to keep it cheap on DVD authoring, look into DVDFlick - its free, does basic menus, and has a variety of options for encoding quality.