opinion on choosing a digital camcorders

[patrick_leung2]

Hi! I am a new comer. I have some question about digital camcorders.

I see there are a lot of digital camcorders around, some of them are

mini DV

and some are digital 8.

I would like to like what is the main difference between them, except

the

size and the CCD pixels?

I just want to get a good one to take some videos, size is not a

problem.

And I don't need it to take photos. I have a 3.3M digital camera.

I see there is a digital 8 camcorder DCR-TRV350 that means my needs.

But the only problem is the viewfinder is B/W. However, the LCD

viewfinder

in the photo is color. Am I missing something?

Does anyone have any experience on this camcorder?

Or should I get a mini DV? Will it give me better image quality?

And for editing, I know I need to get a IEEE-1394 card to speed up the

transfer time. But, do I need to get a special video editing card to

do the

jobs?

And one more thing I am not sure this camcorder has AV-in or not.

My budget is about $500-$700 US. Thanks for your help!

[j_yabrow1]

Hi Patrick, I have no experience with digital 8, but I have been using a SONY DCR-TRV20 miniDV camcorder for a while now and I can highly recommend it. I bought mine used about 18 months ago and they're now selling (on Ebay) for $500-$600. The miniDV is great and the TRV20 has a large 3.5" color LCD as well as a color viewfinder. I recently hooked it up to my computer with a generic IEEE-1394 card and the Sony-supplied video editing software, and capturing was no problem. You need LOTS of disk space (1Gig = 3-5 min video w/DV-NTSC codec).

 

I'm pretty sure most of the miniDV camcorders have DV & AV I/O, I don't know about the Digital-8s.

 

Some words of caution: if you're buying used, TEST THE CAMCORDER THOROUGHLY BEFORE SHOOTING ANYTHING IMPORTANT. And preferably buy from someone who has a return policy.

 

Also, use one brand of tape consistently in the camcorder. I ran a prefunctory test of my used camcorder w/maxell tape and it worked fine. However, when I used TDK tape, the resulting video recording was riddled with digital noise!! Never happens with Maxell tape, often happens with TDK tape. Easy to remedy by just using the one brand of tape, however I can never recover the noisy recordings I made because i didn't test. One of the video engineers I work with told me that the DV tapes have different lubrication and tension specs and switching tape brands could cause performance problems.

 

Good Luck!

[j.w.]

Patrick;

 

The B/W viewfinder/color LCD screen feature I highly recommend. The reason is that you cannot effectively discern focus on a pixellated color viewfinder. You've got to view the image on a B/W phosphor screen, which has a continuous phosphor coating. The ENG-grade shoulder-mounted camcorders used by professional news agencies use this feature a lot, too. And with the color LCD screen, you can still manage to evaluate scene color, etc. My Hi8 Sony camcorder has this same feature, and I love it. I've used lots of other camcorders, both digital and analog, and I've yet to see a color viewfinder which has as accurate display of scene focus as a B/W.

 

The differences between Digital 8 and miniDV come down to: 1) cost of the blank tapes. Hi8 tapes are cheaper. 2) If you have a library of analog 8mm/Hi8 tapes, most Sony Digital8 cameras will digitize the playback of these tapes via the firewire output. Its a nice way to 'up-format' your older tape library.

 

As for format specs, they're both sampled at 4:1:1, so there's little difference. I would suspect the Digital 8 would have less issues with dropouts in the longrun (which you won't notice, due to error correction code in the format, until it gets really bad...) because the tape is a bit bigger, hence track length is longer for the same quantity of data.