Camcorder - Dvd? harddrive? Tape?

Question

I am looking to purchase a camcorder, to start taking videos of my daughter.

I have no idea where to start. So I thought I would maybe start with whether tapes, dvd, hardrives? Which one is the best...pros/cons of any? TIA!

And if anyone has a camcorder they recommend, please feel free to share! Thanks!

Answer 1

HD = High Definition

DVD based camcorders are great in theory but lousy in practice - best avoided.

MiniDV camcorders give the best video quality, are cheapest (because DVDs and hard drives are sexier than tape) and are best for editing.  The tapes are a good archival medium too, which I think is important when you're recording your kids.  On the down side, you transfer video to your PC in real time (i.e. an hour of video takes an hour to download) and the video uses a lot of disk space.

Hard drive camcorders produce slightly inferior video (though it's getting better) and it's not as good for editing.  You can transfer video to your PC much quicker than realtime.  You can get a lot of video on a hard drive, so you don't need to mess around with tapes, but there's nothing to archive to.  As a number of posts to YA! have shown, they're quite fragile - not good when kids are around.

Answer 2

Agree with iridflare...

DO NOT GET A DVD BASED CAMCORDER.

Answer 3

This would really be a lot easier to answer if you gave a price range. Also, do you need it to be HD?