What is the best high definition hard disc camcorder?

Question

What is the best high definition hard disc camcorder?

Answer 1

Personally, at the moment if I was going to buy a hard drive based HD camera, it would be the HG10. For the most part seems to have the best quality of the AVCHD codec, and has the most extra features in its class.

If you want a really small HD camera, you might want to look at the panasonics.

Answer 2

The BEST one is actually a miniDV tape based camcorder with an external hard drive that connects with a firewire cable. Firestore makes them

The reason they are good is because of the format the video is stored - DV or HDV - which compresses video information WAY less than the highly MPEG2 or AVCHD methods used by typical internal hard drive consumer camcorders...

http://firestore.com/solutions/video_pro...

Please refer to the "Direct to Edit" Recorders.

Sony has a hard drive recorder that works with most of their pro series rigs, but they've recently been pushing it with the HVR-V1U and newly released HVRS270U:

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-broadca...

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-HVR-DR60-Reco...

Of course, there is the Red series which write to your choice of media...

http://www.red.com/cameras

But they don't do audio, so you have more homework to do there...

Or... If you don't want a hard drive and are looking for the "best optical disc" camcorder, I think that is

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-PDW...

but I don't think it does high definition...

I guess it depends on what sort of "disc" you want and what your budget is...

You will note that pretty much all of these

... or these:

http://www.panasonic.com/business/provid...

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-broadca...

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/contro...

http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/categ...

* Do not have an internal hard drive;

* Do not use DVD's for storage media;

* Do not use AVCHD compression...

* Typically store DV or HDV format video...

You can apply these same basic principles to a good consumer High Definition camcorder.