Looking for the best camcorder that has a hard drive and is the best bang for my buck. Any ideas??

Question

Looking for the best camcorder that has a hard drive and is the best bang for my buck. Any ideas??

Answer 1

Since you did not provide a budget, the BEST camcorder that has a hard drive will be a miniDV tape based camcorder with an external drive from Firestore. This is because the Firestore drive - as with miniDV tape - records in DV and HDV which uses the least amount of compression on the video stream.

Highly compressed MPEG2 and AVCHD video as found in most consumer camcorders with internal hard drives just compress too much. This is one of the reasons you won't find many professionals using internal hard drive based camcorders.

Compression = discarded data = reduced video quality.

There are many other features that define a "good" camcorder and whether you need some of these features will dictate which path you take.

What will you be recording?

Do you need external mics?

Do you need full manual audio control (a MUST for really loud or really low audio).

Is standard definition all you need - or do you need high definition?

What sort of lighting will you be shooting under?

What is the target audience of your video (home, YouTube, pre-sumer, professional)?

Will you be in extreme environmental surroundings?

There's more, but this is a good start.

If you are stuck on not doing miniDV tape, frankly, I would skip the hard drive and suggest one of the Canon FS camcorders or maybe even the Sony HDR-CX7. Flash memory uses less power, can be replaced when full (like miniDV tape) and does not have any motor noise potential like hard drive or tape based systems.