How are Hard-drive camcorders or should I just stay with a tape style camcorder.?

Question

How are Hard-drive camcoreders or should I just stay with a tape stlye camcoreder. So what would be the best kind of camcored to buy if I wanted to record my son playing basketball but only when he was playing and then pick up were I left off when he comes back in.

Answer 1

Hard drive camcorders record in MPEG-2 format.  It's a lossy format that compresses the video by just recording what's changed over a period of about half a second or so.  That means it's OK for recording things like paint drying, but it's not so good if you want to record something with lots of movement - like basketball!  I'd go with MiniDV.