Camcorder Media Matters – What's Your Format?
The most confusing part of buying a camcorder can be choosing among the four types of recording media available: MiniDV tapes; removable MiniDVDs; hard disk drives; and flash memory cards. The choice is really about convenience, price and personal preference. Here are some pros and cons.
MiniDV tape
Pro: compact; affordable; able to preserve original image quality without compression; good software to support editing.
Con: have to use camcorder for playback; winding/rewinding tape eventually degrades quality; need to transfer images to computer with large hard drive for editing.
DVDs
Pro: random access to any clip; easier editing in-camera or on computer; rapid duplication of discs for sharing; convenient playback on computer, DVD players, even PlayStations.
Con: recording time limited to one hour with single-sided discs, two hours with dual layer; images are compressed when stored to disc and quality is subtly affected; some discs allow only one use, others rewritable.
Internal hard drives
Pro: with capacities up to 60GB, internal drives can hold 28 hours of video, far more than other formats; one-button burning of DVDs for easy sharing, transfer, playback; in-camera or in-computer editing.
Con: still pricey; still require image compression; and what happens to your video if that big hard drive goes down?
Flash memory cards
Pro: first offered as an extra storage option for still images on both tape and disk camcorders; now coming into use as primary storage media for video as well as stills, thereby eliminating moving parts, reducing size, increasing durability.
Con: not yet supported by in-camera editing software; requires image compression; less storage than hard drives.