Planning to buy a hard disk camcorder to take to india,?

Question

choice SR 82/85 Sony Handycam which would be better

Answer 1

If you are going on vacation, are you planning to take a computer? If not, what do you plan to do when the hard drive in the camcorder is full?

I am going to Europe - with a miniDV tape based camcorders - I am taking lots of tape and I know there is miniDV tape for sale where I am going. When a tape fills, I pop it out, lock it, label it, put it back in its case, get another tape and keep shooting. I can change (60 minute) tapes in less than 6 seconds.

If you have to get a hard drive camcorder, get the biggest hard drive you can afford. At least it will take longer to run out of hard drive space... Use only "best quality" mode. In LP mode, you can record longer, but the video quality is terrible.

Something you should know: When I press record and fill the entire 60 minute tape, when I import that video to my computer for editing, I get a single 60 minute file. If I press stop and record, I get whatever number of files that I pressed stop and record for. In the hard drive camcorder world, when you press record, a new file will be made for every 20 minutes of video. If you press record/pause several times, that will be multiple data files, too.

Also, be advised that due to the low compression miniDV tape camcorders use to write digital video to tape, they provide the best available video quality. The internal hard drive based camcorders store in a highly compressed MPEG2 format. Compressed video = lost data = reduce video quality.

If these are the only two camcorders you are shopping, flip a coin. They are similar enough where you will not notice any difference. But my recommendation of buying a miniDV tape based camcorder (DCR-HC96 if you are somehow married to Sony) still stands.

AND... All three camcorders mentioned in this reply are NTSC - neither camcorder will connect to a PAL TV and let you see what you recorded.

DO NOT GET A DVD BASED CAMCORDER.