What's best on a camcorder, hard disc or dvd?

Question

What's best on a camcorder, hard disc or dvd?

Answer 1

Of the two, I would pick hard disc (HDD), but I'm not happy with either of these.

DVD camcorders took over in 2007 as the most popular consumer format. This is largely because you can just pop one into your DVD player, usually (your player needs to support DVD-R at least, and ideally, the DVD-VR format used for better camcorder recording).

The problem is quality vs. time... you can only get 19 minutes of MPEG-2 (or AVCHD) video on an 8cm DVD (a bit more if you spring for a double-sided one), versus as much as 2 hours worth on a consumer miniDV camcorder. And the miniDV video will be slightly higher quality. To get more on a DVD, you drop quality even more.

For HDDs, you have enough space to keep the quality higher, at least for awhile. The problem here is that you'll eventually run out of room. If you only ever shoot for a couple of hours before docking with a PC, you'll be fine with an HDD model. But if not, you'll also have to got to lower quality.

There are now some "hybrid" models, that can record on HDD and SDHC flash cards.. that's not a bad solution. Today, 16GB cards are affordable (that's usually about 1/2 the storage of the HDD in your camcorder), and if you have the option of using flash, you have recourse for when the HDD fills up.

The other complaint... the HDD is likely to be the most fragile component of any camcorder... easier to break than your tape mechanism, you DVD drive, or even your lens. And HDD camcorders suck more power than other kinds.

I own two HDV camcorders, and it's still quite true that tape offers the best overall quality and storage density. That's starting to change, though. If you go high-definition, you'll find there are many format options, and you can't necessarily do them all on tape. If I were buying a new camcoder today, to ADD to my collection, I would probably look at a small AVCHD flash-based camcorder, like the Canon HF100. This has very high quality, flash is cheap, etc.

However, for either HDD or flash, you have to be diligent about backing up your video. My tapes are always sitting on my tape shelf... if my computer dies, I still have my originals, even if I didn't run a backup recently. If you download all that HDD or flash video and your computer dies, or a virus comes along and eat them, you've lost it forever if you don't have a backup.

Answer 2

neither.

MiniDV tape continues to provide best available video quality because DV and HDV compress less than the other storage methods.

video compression = discarded data = reduced video quality

But if you must...

Hard drive and flash memory use the same high compression application when storing the video and are tied for the next best.

DVD based camcorders are the worst.