Camcorder Recording Media

[mcs328]

A couple years ago I went to HK, China and Taiwan. For the trip I bought a Sony Camcorder that recorded video in Mini-DV. I've used this camcorder one more time after that. It's a pain to transfer the video to an avi file because 1 minute of video is 1 minute to transfer. My brother at the time got a Sony that had in internal HDD. The transfer was faster.

Fast forward 4-5 years later. What recording media is the best nowadays? I'm looking for something easy to transfer to PC/MAC, plenty of storage and/or ability to add storage, quality and future compatibility. No CD or DVD or cassette. Do you find SD cards widely available, affordable, future proof and big enough to capture long videos? Or does HDD the way to go? My iPhone 4 video camera is fine for out of the blue moments but for like weddings, birthdays, etc I would like a dedicated gadget I can mount on a tripod.

Any personal experience or gadgets you guy recommend?

[cruelpupet]

For future prrofing the #1 rule is stay away from Sony. They love to push proprietary and inferior formats.

SD Card readers are built into 99% of all laptops and are an option on most PCs these days. I'd probably buy a micro SD card for it, with an adapter for fullsize to cover my options on using the card in different devices.

[Devhux]

Nothing's wrong with Sony camcorders now, since they either have hard drives or can take regular SD Cards (yes, Sony has backed down slightly from their Memory Stick-only support).

SD cards are readily available and generally not too badly priced. The nice thing about an SD card-based camcorder is that they tend to be a little more reliable than a hard drive unit.

Do note that if you want to edit HD video (in AVCHD format), you'll need a reasonably powerful computer - but playback shouldn't be much of an issue if you are mostly wanting to archive video instead of editing it.

[cruelpupet]

Nothing's wrong with Sony camcorders now, since they either have hard drives or can take regular SD Cards (yes, Sony has backed down slightly from their Memory Stick-only support).

Yea, but I still wouldnt trust them especially since there are other brands that are just as good or better.

[Jeffbx]

I also say no to sony - they've pulled too many shenanigans for me to trust them anymore. Another vote for flash-based - you can get 32GB SD for under $50 these days, for crying out loud. Crazy.

[mcs328]

The Sony camcorder I have also has a slot for the memory card. It was hard to find an expensive so I did without it. Cool. That narrows it down to ones that take SD cards or even SDHC cards.

[DarkFury]

Personally, I went with a HDD camcorder.

Mine is made by Panasonic. Works great and editing digital video straight from the HDD to my PC is so much nicer than my older camcorder that used a tape.