Hi, I am in the market for my FIRST digital camcorder and I know absolutely nothing about them and, quite frankly, am confused by the terminology I encounter as I try to research the options. What I want to be able to do is to shoot family, vacation, special event type video; download it to my computer, edit the video, then burn it to cdr / dvd. Would some of you please be so kind as to suggest cameras that will allow me to do those things with realative simplicity? I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks. WD
One of the easiest to use is the Panasonic SV-AV100 miniature camcorder. It records to SD cards instead of to a tape. After recording, you plug your camera into a USB port on your computer using the cable provided. Then you "drag and drop" the file names of the files you made onto, for instance, the source tab of a program like TMPG-DVDauthor. Then click on the output button. When it is finished making your DVD, it offers to burn it. Insert your blank DVDR and click on the "start" button, and in a few minutes you have a DVD you can view on your TV. There's a lot more editing stuff you can do if you want, but this is about as simple as you can get for video-to-DVD. If you get a camcorder that uses tape, you'll have to do extra steps to transfer and then convert your files into mpeg2 files. For details on how to use this unique camera, visit http://www.zyvid.com/smf
It's priced $650 at Amazon and the 512 Mb SD card only lasts for 10 minutes. They say only Panasonic SD cards are really compatible with this camera... It seems you'll be hooked with Panasonic 4ever if you go this way...
Not true. Most people buying this camera only pay about $300, but they have to chase the deals. All the recent 1GB and 2GB cards work fine in the camera, assuming that you have done the firmware update posted here: http://zyvid.com/smf/index.php?topic=7.0 With the 2GB card, you get about 44 minutes video recording.
