Mini dv or dvd camcoder?

Question

which of those two is better for a camcoder this is my first time buying one?

Answer 1

MiniDV - cheaper, better video quality, more reliable, more robust, easier to edit, the media are easier to get hold of in strange exotic locations and you don't have to remember to finalise the DVD before you try to use it only to discover that it's not compatible with your DVD recorder.

The downside of MiniDV is that you need a firewire card in your PC to capture the video, video capture is done in realtime i.e. an hour of video takes an hour to transfer and the video files are big.  But then firewire cards and big disk drives are quite cheap now.