Well Chuck, I haven't had any thoughts since I haven't been paying attention to the market. From your question, I assume you mean camcorders that record to Compact Flash, Memory Stick or whatever. I I just jumped onto Amazon for a sec to see what was on offer and found a few. As an example, there's a Sanyo that claims to record 21 minutes on a 1 Gig SD card. Can't say I'd be interested. Here's why. The stuff is going to be very highly compressed to squeeze onto a card. It will have to decompress and recompress to put those 'priceless memories' onto DVD. Cards are expensive. If you're going on a vacation and plan to shoot a lot of footage, you're going to have to buy a lot of very expensive cards. OR you're going to have to drag along a laptop to dump the video onto. That's kind of a pain. If said laptop fills up, you're going to have to backup the stuff to a stack of CDs or DVDs. Don't know about you, but I'm tired when I get to the hotel. Backing up a computer is one of the things I go on vacation to get away from. Compare that to carrying along a handful of DV tapes. They're cheap, hold a lot, and aren't compressed. These cameras appear to be built for convenience rather than ultimate video quality. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, as long as convenience is your driving criterion. Battery life is probably a lot better, since there's only a zoom motor to control. I'm sure that--all things considered--they're rather nifty toys that take pretty good movies. But I tend to move slowly on new technology (funny thing for a technologist to say, I guess). I tend to wait a little--or a lot--longer and buy something a little nicer. I STILL don't own a camcorder. MC
Michael, what are your thoughts on the solid-state, direct-to-memory type camcorders? What are the advantages/disadvantages there?
--- Michael Carnes <MichaelCarnes@earthlink.net> wrote:
They're both problematic, but in different ways:
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.utahastronomy.com
Michael Carnes MichaelCarnes@earthlink.net home.earthlink.net/~michaelcarnes