I'm buying a camcorder children on the way what is the best and easy est to use?

Question

i have fought about a harddrive or dvd i realy want 1 that i can put easly on to my pc please help getting very confussed

Answer 1

try this link:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/ratings.php

Accdg to what I also read from most contributors, the preference would be towards HDDisk:  more uninterrupted recoding time; easier to upload & edit on pc; less consumables (dvd disk) inventory to carry around.

Answer 2

It's a decent enough camcorder, and it meets your criterion of being easy to transfer the video to your PC.  I wouldn't choose a hard drive camcorder though, and I wouldn't even consider a DVD one.  First off there's the immediate problem of juggling a young child and a camcorder - which are you going to drop?  Assuming you've said the camcorder, you can pick a MiniDV tape up from the wreckage and you've still got your video.  Do the same with a hard drive based camcorder and there are no guarantees.  

You can build up quite a library of "precious moments" over the years, and they can take up a lot of disk space, assuming the disk carries on working - tape is a much better long term storage option.  

It's a delight to sit and watch your partner pushing your child on the swing, but the pleasure doesn't easily transfer to video - it gets boring very quickly.  You need to edit your footage to produce something that you'll want to keep watching.  MiniDV is a good format for this, MPEG-2 (as used by hard drive camcorders) isn't.

MiniDV is quite slow to transfer to your PC (it takes an hour to capture an hour of video), it takes up a lot of disk space and you need a firewire connection (but they're cheap and easy to install), so it's not all roses!  I still think it's a better option in the long term though.