Took the HD plunge
Oct. 13th, 2008 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyWe 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).
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).
