New Video Camera

For the past two seasons I have been using my digital camera to capture video clips of coasters. Now that I am more serious about making coaster videos, I am planning to buy a video camera before the 2008 season. I am thinking about buying one with a built in hard drive and a very good zoom (preferably 32x optical zoom and up). I'm guessing that the hard drive camera is best for me since I will be editing any videos I take on the computer, which is why I don't believe I need a camera where I can play the disc on a dvd player right after I film something (correct me if you think I am wrong). If possible without getting too expensive, I would also like one that captures good quality stills. My price limit is at most $700. If anyone has any ideas or recomendations on a good video camera, or even just a good quality brand, it would be very appreciated.

the JVC Everio is pretty much what you just described

Canon or Nikon is what I recommend as regard to brands. Which kind? Beats me.

WWS was selling a camera, am I wrong? I don't know about the hard-drive, but I know he described it as being very nice for POVs in particular...

http://www.pricerunner.com/pi/8-989257/ ... oduct-Info

Basicly look at that, records in Hi dfinition 40gb hard drive and its $717, its cannon too, very good make and it should do very good stills!

http://www.butterflyphoto.com/shop/prod ... p=2183B001

Thats where its sold, the previus address is pricerunner, which collects prices for you.

I was recently talking to someone about video cameras and he recommended a mini-dv camcorder. He said that the hard drive camera has a better chance of getting ruined if the it is dropped the wrong way (although any electronic device can if dropped the wrong way) because it will screw up the hard drive and make it unable to record on. Any suggestions/ideas?

[coolbeans326]

Dude... for $800 (just $100 more) it think it would be your best bet to get this camera.

http://www.amazon.com/Canon-HV20-Defini ... 712&sr=8-1

I got the HDD version of basically the same camera and I can say the quality is outstanding. Although I believe that the quality overall is better on the HDD since it's completely digital, you can not go wrong with that camera. Trust me, if you have computer power to process it, go for it.

The camera I have is the Canon HG10. What's nice about the hard drive is that it renders HD faster then real time so litterally in 10 minutes, I can have an hours worth of footage up and ready to go, so keep that in mind too, but then again, I also have a really beefy computer. Also note that with the HDD camera, a lot of them use a special compression software that not all editing software supports. For example Sony and Canon use AVCHD compression software which doesn't work with Windows movie maker or Adobe (yet) but it does work on Pinnacle Software as well as Sony's low end software. But if you go the miniDV route, all you have to worry about is just computer power.