DV Camcorder - any recommendations?

[AndyH]

Hi,

Hopefully this comes under the umbrella of this forum.

Am thinking of investing in a camcorder, but don't really know what I'm looking for. A bit of investigation leads me to believe that

a) I want DV in/out - I'd like to do editing on the PC and either dump back to camcorder and down to VHS short term. Long term I'll encode to DVD straight from the PC.

b) Analogue in would be cool, as I guess I could archive some old VHS stuff a'la DVD-R at some point.

c) I figure if I'm going for this I should really do it properly, so what's the difference between the likes of 800K pixels and 1300K for quality?

d) Do most camcorders have things like a 16:9 mode, even if it's just some sort of hard matte?

e) And following on from c - what else should I be looking for, and what brands stand out in which areas?


Hope you can spend a couple of mins helping!

Cheers,
Andy

PS oh - guess I should say budget could be anything up to 600-700, anything above that would have to be with good reason!

[Greenstead]

I bought the Sony DCR-PC120 camcorder a week ago and took it on holiday. I would recommend this model but it is well over your price limit. It does the features you listed and has a flash and takes stills at 1.5Mpixels (which is one main reason why I went for this model over cheaper ones since I want to avoid buying a digital camera). The results are really excellent both movies and stills.
Some other points of interest:
- The MPEG ability onto memory stick seems poor quality and an unecessary gimmick.
- Buy memory cassettes instead of normal DV tapes. Their indexing ability is worth the extra cost.
- The nightshot facility is fun but of little real value.
- Get a 64K memory stick (comes with 8K).

The DCR-PC101 is very similar and available for around £850 from Pixmainia or camerasdirect. Pixmania do packages with extra batteries and memory at good prices.

Check for prices on Dealtime.

[AndyH]

Will have a look! Thanks for the reply.