Any recommendations on the most bang for the buck? my wife wants a video cam to record the Little Monster doing her thing. The one we have now only works when it wants, and weighs about 45 pounds (the camera, that is). We don’t need top of the line, but just something that will work. We’re not doing editing, or trying to get to hollywood.
Any recommenddations are appreciated
My BF and I just bought a camcorder that was Consumer reports best pick, and we love it. It is a HDD and holds an SD card. It is 30GB and you can also add a 2 or 3 GB sd card. It is easy to use, has an amazing zoom and other features. It is a Panasonic SDR-H18. It is a hard drive model, so no tapes, or disc, and you just download to your computer then burn to a disc. The program that comes with it isn’t the greatest but Roxio has a good program out there.
thanks for the reply. that looks like a good option. It was also reviewed well on Cnet. I’ll look into it
Any others?
Last one I bought was a tiny sony model that fit easy in a purse, I think size is more important than most of the features. All the cheap ones do well in bright light and poorly in dim light.
The hard drive models are tempting. A couple of factors to consider with them though…1) hard drives are likely to fail in 3 years or so, esp in something that gets banged around a lot. 2) you HAVE to trasfer the recordings to your computer, whereas with the miniDV models you can alway just buy more tapes. Also note that DVD’s are NOT permanant, if you want the pictures to be available in 20 years you cannot rely on cheap DVD’s to hold onto it for that long…not that miniDV is necessarily better in that regard…to make it permanant your best bet is to get a terabyte NAS RAID and hope you never have a fire or flood.