Took the HD plunge

[johnridley]

We have a daughter who's a senior this year, and a vacation coming up, so I decided it was time to upgrade the camcorder that I bought last year to tide us over from when the old one broke to when HD was more stable. I really wanted to go HD last year, but at the time all the decent HD camcorders were $1000 and up, so I bought an SD camcorder open box from Amazon for under $200 bucks, fully intending to upgrade in a year or two.

It was in the cards, I knew that once we got a good-sized HD TV, the SD camcorder would really start to bug me. Seeing my daughter's last concert where she appears as 6 or 8 skooshy pixels pushed me over the edge on this; I want us to have something better to keep for the rest of our lives.

I've been researching this on and off for probably 3 months, and I was all set to purchase a Canon HV20, but in the end my recollection that EVERY camcorder I've had fail, failed in the tape mechanism, turned me away. That, and the fact that the best prices were from eCost for refurbs, and eCost has the most horrendously bad reviews on Reseller Ratings that I think I've ever seen, made me blink.

The reviewers (mainly camcorderinfo.com) seem to think that the flash-based, AVCHD camcorders have finally come into their own, and the Canon HF10 was the "first great AVCHD camcorder."

MiniDV still delivers a slightly superior picture, but I decided the advantages of no tape mechanism to cause me grief, and easier transfer and backup, made up the difference.

There's an HF11 out too, but it's exactly the same camera with a higher bitrate option, 24Mbps (the maximum allowed by the spec) instead of 17, it's $450 more and the reviews say you can barely tell the difference, other than that it chews up memory faster.

Then I looked at the Canon HF100. Same thing as the HF10, but with no internal memory. That internal memory was 16GB but cost $120 more. Since I can get 16GB class 6 SDHC cards for $35, and I wasn't really convinced that internal memory was even a good idea, that's where I went.

I wound up getting the camcorder from Newegg, who had them in stock for $4 cheaper than Amazon (who didn't have them in stock), but I got a couple of 16G cards and a mini HDMI cable (they have a new mini version of HDMI because the camcorder's so small) from Amazon, and a spare, 3x bigger battery from an eBay vendor.

Of course, since I'm not going to be shooting directly onto my archival media anymore, I suspect that in the next few months I'll be buying a pair of terabyte external hard drives as archive and backup media. I'm already doing dual hard drives for photograph storage and backup.

Then again, a 16GB card holds 2 hours of video and are currently $35. They wouldn't have to get much cheaper before I decided they were cheap enough to use as archival media (though I realize I'd have to set up a schedule to reflash them every 5 years or so).

Comments

[bloggingchick.livejournal.com]

There may not have been much point in getting a miniDV camcorder. FWIW my instructor said those will be going the way of the DVD (vs. Blu-Ray). Not sure if it's in the near future or eventually down the line. We use the miniDV's for now, but they also bought a few that record onto the internal drive. Some Panasonic, one or two Sony, not sure what models. I think the Sony has the option to record in 16:9 widescreen.

Although, iirc the instructor said the ones that record to internal memory give the sharpest picture which is why they bought some. They are expensive so only the advanced students are allowed to use them.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't touch a hard drive based camcorder. Hard drives crash, you lose everything. There's no way I'd trust them. That's why I went with a flash based unit.

I assume that when you say "records to internal memory" you mean versus tape? I hope he's not saying that internal flash memory is somehow magically "better" than plug-in flash memory.

Assuming he's talking miniDV versus AVCHD, I don't think your instructor is correct as far as sharper picture, unless he's talking much more expensive memory-based cameras, or the miniDV camcorders in question are not HD. MiniDV HD camcorders use the HDV codec, while the nonlinear memory (flash and hard drive) based units use AVCHD, which has a maximum spec throughput of 24Mbps, and only the latest generation hit that bitrate. MiniDV is about 32Mbps and always has been. AVCHD is a more efficient codec, but that only makes them about even, and the samples I've seen where the two cameras were otherwise similar as far as sensor platform and image processing, the miniDV had a fairly obvious edge in rendering complex textures such as brick walls or busy stuff like wood grain.

It's possible that SOME given flash camcorder has a better picture than SOME given miniDV camcorder, but that's another issue.

Moreover, whether one or the other is "better" depends on the subject matter. AVCHD and HDV are both interframe compressed, but they're optimized for different sorts of movement.

However, AVCHD does employ the MPEG4 H.264 codec, so it's theoretically possible to master AVCHD data directly to Blu-ray without transcoding, so that's an advantage if you're talking sharpness at the final product.

I'd be interested in hearing more of exactly what he meant though.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

BTW, it's also going to be a while before Blu-ray replaces DVD. Blu-ray has already saturated the early adopters market, and sales have declined sharply this year. For the majority of consumers, and for watching movies on 42" and smaller sets, DVD is just fine. I might personally get a blu-ray player, but not until they're < $100. My $70 upconverting DVD player looks pretty darn good. Even among the gadget folks at work, the only ones who have bought blu-ray are the guys with really big, expensive screens (like 60+", $3000+ sets). The vast majority are happy with DVD and don't have any real interest in blu-ray.

Just look at Netflix, which is where most people I know get their movies to watch every weekend. 100,000 DVDs, 500 blu-ray discs. Blu-ray's time has not yet come.