Sponge Posted March 13, 2008 Report Share Posted March 13, 2008 As per the title - if so, I'd appreciate your comments on it. Since our 2nd child was born, I'm thinking of getting one to fully benefit from our HD TV. I'm torn between formats, i.e. HDV or AVCHD; tape, memory card, or hard drive. So far, my shortlist contains these: Panasonic HDC-SD9 Panasonic HDC-HS9 Canon HV20 I'm leaning towards this one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigyb Posted March 13, 2008 Report Share Posted March 13, 2008 I've got a Sony HDR-HC3E, very nice and fantastic picture quality. Probably been superceded by now as I bought it over 12 months ago, but still a great HD camera. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
techieboy Posted March 13, 2008 Report Share Posted March 13, 2008 I bought the missus the HDC-SD9 for Christmas. Excellent quality video and as the first camcorder we've ever had, very easy to use. It's light and really comfortable to handle. The user interface is very slick (I couldn't get on with the Sony touch screen interface), battery life seems really good and you get a decent amount of footage on a 16Gb SD card. Pictures look fantastic when it's hooked up to the 40" LCD. Recordings aren't amazing in low light conditions though. The biggest problem with it, is the AVCHD format it records in (and most hi-def cameras). Can take a fairly chunky PC a while to edit and process the footage and convert to DVD. There's not too many packages that can handle the format yet but we're getting on fine with Pinnacle Studio 11 (unfortunately, Adobe Premiere can't handle it yet). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sponge Posted March 14, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2008 Whether my PC (or more likely, my wife's) is powerful enough for AVCHD editing is one of my concerns. Also, as it's a relatively new format, it's continually being improved (allegedly) but I don't see any of the currnet hardware having the ability to be updated (firmware updates). So any increases in quality/efficiency will only be gained by buying a new product. Something I obviously do not want to do. I was caught out by Sony when I bought my current mmv camcorder and I have no desire to be shafted by a new format again. I can appreciate the benefits of recording to memory cards, or even a HDD, and tape seems so old-fashioned. Furthermore, my Panasonic HDTV accepts SD cards, so I could literally take the card from the camcorder and play it directly through my TV. Something else which appeals greatly. However, I'm leaning towards the theoretically better quality of HDV on tape. With it's greater support by editing software. Plus the Canon HV20 is cheaper. I'd prefer the HV30 (I like black), but it looks like there is very little difference hardware wise to justify the extra £. I'm currently looking for somewhere to download some AVCHD sample files to see if I can process them on my PC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigyb Posted March 14, 2008 Report Share Posted March 14, 2008 It took about 3 hours to render a 30 minute clip of 1080i film. The PC was an Intel Dual core E6600 with 4GB RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sponge Posted March 14, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2008 Hmm, sounds like I'll be buggered then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now