Which is the best among Mini DV, Hard disk and Flash memory?

magis

What is the difference between them? And which is best? I want to buy camcorder, but I do not know how to choose. How do you think about these three models? I can get much information from here. Thanks.

kryyst

Best is for picture quality is Mini-DV it always will be the best.

Hard Disk is best for ease of use and storage capacity. But if you want to do serious editing you may run into issues. Movies stored on harddisk are stored in a mpeg2 or 4 which means you are only getting every other or every 4th frame.

To bottom line it for you.
If you want to do just regular capture the family recording then hard disk recording is absolutely the way to go, it's simple to use, easy to work with and you never have to worry about tapes or anything.

If you want to do serious editing then Mini-DV is the way to go.

airbornflght

I thought the hard disk camcorders would store the raw stream at the expense of storage time. Is that not so?

Madball

airbornflght wrote:

I thought the hard disk camcorders would store the raw stream at the expense of storage time. Is that not so?

I think some can, but most don't. I have a Canon HG10, which has a hdd. It can only record in AVC format.

I felt hdd was the way to go for me due to ease of use. No tape to change, lots of recording time, and easy to edit. It records at 1080i, which completely blows away my old miniDV cam. I wouldn't even bother with another SD camcorder.

A HD flash based cam would be my second choice. Especially if you want portability and battery life. I almost got one instead, but the amount of storage space just wasn't enough.

airbornflght

Yeh I know there are many flash memory camcorders that can do hd. I was looking for a camera for my fraternity and I was looking for 720p. But if it doesn't offer the ability to record to dv-avi or some equivalent uncompressed format that is going to hamper my interest.