What kind of Camcorder is best...?

Question

I am in the market for a modestly-priced digital camcorder, but am having trouble deciding which format of memory I want to use. For shooting long segments, I know a hard drive will hold the most, but how are Flash cards and Mini-DV's? Do they hold a decent amount of footage? How long can you shoot with these before you have to change it?

I really don't want to go on vacation or to special occasions and have to change a disc/flash card every half hour.

Answer 1

The short answer: a Canon FS10 will get you 1 hour and 50 minutes of record time at highest quality and costs $373 at amazon.com

How did I come to that? First I looked on Cnet at cameras in the $300-$400 dollar range. I then sorted them by the editor's rating and threw out the first one because it was a DVD recorder and they can be slow. The second highest was the FS10 that I selected. I then looked at Canon's site to get the specifications. This told me what recording media it uses (8GB internal flash and 8GB removable SDHC flash) and how long it would run. Finally I looked at Amazon for pricing information. Is this the right camera for you? I don't even know what you mean by "moderately-priced", but I have shown you how to fish for yourself.

Whatever you do, don't get a Mini-DV camera, they use the same tape mechanism (helical scan) as old VHS players do and I have seen them jam far too often, They are also noisy when running and the internal microphone picks that up.