Community Newsletter: Q&A: What are the differences in today's camcorders? Go HD or wait?

My Advice: Wait till next year if you have the patience

In reply to: What are the differences in today's camcorders? Go HD or wait? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

I found myself in a similar situation this year when my miniDV camcorder bit the dust (of course costing more to repair than replace).

I think the main decision point is whether to replace with something similar and cheap to tide you over (saving the money to go HD down the road) or to go HD right now. I carefully considered the latter but in the end decided to replace my camcorder with another miniDV for this year.

I got a very good, slightly used, current model Panasonic for under $100 on eBay that rivals my originally priced $1200 Sony that died. This will tide me over until the HD market matures a little more and is a small enough investment that it doesn't in any way impact my ability to buy what I want in an HD camera next year.

If you are going to replace with something similar and relatively cheap, I think miniDV tape is the way to go. The quality is very good and the hype over DVD and disk based solutions have made them a real bargain.

If you don't have the patience to wait, here is what came out of my investigation of option two: buying an HD camcorder now....

First, you will get better quality but only if you have an HDTV. If you do, you really only need 720p unless you have a very big screen (>60 inches) in which case you will want 1080. I find the motion artifacts on 1080i to be significant so when I do get an HD Camcorder I will hopefully be able to get one with good 1080p support.

Second, my experience with my 7 year old $1200 Sony, which works perfectly well except for a misfiring moisture sensor that basically prevents it from allowing me to record thus making it an expensive paperweight, tells me my next camcorder will have a minimum of moving parts. This eliminates tape based as well as DVD and HD based camcorders. So for me, my next camcorder will need to use SD or MMC cards as its sole storage medium.

Third, I would very much like it to have a docking station that serves to charge, connect to HDMI input on my tv and USB on my HTPC. It seems that we should be able to expect by now to move beyond the geek phase for camcorders where you must hook up ac adaptors, firewire cables and AV adaptors to work with the output. Currently, the only HD camera I know of that comes with a dock that does all this is the Sanyo HD1000 (more on it later).

Fourth, the biggest complaint I had about my Sony camcorder, besides those already mentioned, was its poor low light performance. I have recently archived all my vides to a hard disk and in the process got a chance to look at them again and see a clear pattern of noisy blotchy, poor contrast images under normal indoor light. Perhaps I will need to wait more than a year for this but at a minimum, I would expect my HD camcorder to have a sensor bigger than the 1/6" one my Sony has or at least to take advantage of all the signal processing improvements that have come since 1999 to do a better job in low light.

Fifth is cost. If you eliminate mechanical components (other than the zoom lens servo) it seems that you should be able to manufacture this ideal camera for significantly less than what vendors are charging for them today. I think this is because you are paying for the up front R&D expenses, typical for the early adopter. In another year or so, such camcorders will hopefully become more commoditized and their price start to line up better with their true manufacturing cost which I believe should be lower than the existing miniDV manufacturing costs.

A final word on the Sanyo HDC1000. When I put all my criteria against what was out there in the HD world, this camera came the closest to matching them. If I had decided to pull the trigger this year, I would probably have bought this one. But when I looked at it, my impression was that next year's model, if they listen to their current customers, will likely get all the kinks out of the design and hopefully bring down the price as well so better to wait. After all, I expect to keep my next camcorder for many years.

It will also be likely that AVHCD software and drivers will have become plentful making it easy to digitally manipulate the output. Right now, you are really a pioneer with this type of camcorder output.

Finally, I expect by that time that the major camcorder manufactures (i.e. Canon and Sony) will have competing products to further increase the value to the customer. This is already starting to happen with recent announcements but, in my opinion, it needs a year or so to really ready its potential.