Hi all, Was interested in purchasing a camcorder that can do it all. Camera, camcorder and DVR in one. I read about the Aiptek, but it's very cheap and that scares me quite a bit. However, I like how simply it's reported to plug into your tv and wham, you're done. Is there a better camcorder out there in the world that doubles as a dvr, better frame rate( this one is 640x480, 30fps), etc...? Thanks, Mike
I would not call this a serious camcorder. It fits more in the category gadgets. One thing's for sure: recording in VGA-mode (MPEG @ 640x480) will not result in great picture quality. Any camcorder that has an analog input can be used as DVR and most of them can also take pictures.
Hi, I own an analog Hi8,miniDV, and a Dimage Z3. Last december I bought a DV6800, the predecessor of DV8800. I would say that the video from this device is quite decent and it is even better than the digitized video from my analog Hi8. We refer to this device as Hybrids and it is becoming quite popular, the price is also getting cheaper. Recording video from TV or other video source is one of the reason why I bought this camera, you can even turn this into a video monitor. The biggest advatage is that the file from the SD card can be directly downloaded to the computer. DV8800 is MPEG4 but used windows ASF instead of AVI DivX. 640x480 is quite close to DVD (752x480). Recording time for 1 GB card at full resolution is 45 minutes, for QVGa it is about 1.5 hours.
thanks for the replies both of you. Juandela, I've already read that the Archos all-in-one is good as well. Any thoughts on that one as well? And I went to a couple places TPF and was told that most camcorders don't have the analog inputs, only outputs so you can watch it on tv. So far, not alot of luck out there unfortunatly...
