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Hi all,

A friend is looking at buying a digital video camera. It's mainly for travel (He's away travelling several months of every year) The requirements are small, light and the best quality.

Price is no object.

Can anyone recommend a brand/model - I have no idea about these things

Canon HF10? High Def, SD card memory with 16gb built in flash memory. NO MOVING PARTS. That is what we would recommend in the shop.

Thanks!

My limited research this morning came up with the same idea so that makes sense

a few questiions to consider - How much editing do they want to do? In the past many hard drive / mini DVD based camera's export the footage on a MP2 format and will not allow the average punter to edit their footage. Good for play back only or unedited footage being burnt to DVD. Hard drive camera's you have the worry of mechanical hard drive failure but flash drive I have no experience expect to say I am writing this post on a Asus EeePC that has a 12GB flash drive and all has been good with this.

My second question is as their is no tape you have to consider storage / archiving of footage (Mini DV tapes are only good for 10 years anyway) and if your away and the hard drive fills up do you have a lap top tp transfer too? I believe at full res the camera mentioned has 7hrs of storage?

We just made the leap to HD spending over a lot on our camera and new editing suite to cope with the HD format. My experience 2 years ago with small consumer JVC HD camera's where not great. The camera we decided on for HD was Canon and to date over the past 2 months of ownership we are pleased. So remember you'll need greater PC power as well if you plan to edit in HD over SD as well.

Hudo

Thanks Hudo, That helps.

Canon promises that all the 'essential' editing software is in the box with all their new camcorders, the HF-10 included. ATM it also comes with a free 8gb SDHC (Verbatim ones). The other cameras in this category are the Sony HDR-CX7 (Carl Zeiss lens, MS Pro Duo format) and the Panasonic HDC-SD9 (3CCD, Leica lens, bonus 32gb of SDHC, either 2x 16gb or a 32gb), so have a look at those two as well.

If the camera you're looking is hard drive based and saves in AVCHD I would suggest avoiding these if you intend to film and edit a lot. I got one for work this year and its a pain to convert the files it creates into a format Adobe Premiere / Apple Final Cut Pro can use.

aim54x wrote:Panasonic HDC-SD9 (3CCD, Leica lens, bonus 32gb of SDHC, either 2x 16gb or a 32gb)

He ended up getting the Panasonic and is very happy with it (we managed to pick up the last 32GB SD Card promotional box that the place had in stock)

Thanks all for the advice!

We have 1 x single chip (used as a SD deck on the editing suite) and 3 x 3CCD SD Panasonic camera's and have been very happy with their performance over the past 6~7 years. Be it Canon, Sony, JVC or Panasonic you can't go wrong.

dviv wrote:

aim54x wrote:Panasonic HDC-SD9 (3CCD, Leica lens, bonus 32gb of SDHC, either 2x 16gb or a 32gb)

He ended up getting the Panasonic and is very happy with it (we managed to pick up the last 32GB SD Card promotional box that the place had in stock)

Thanks all for the advice!

Great to hear that you I was able to help in some way.