Which camcorder?

iamnew

Hi there everybody - hoping for a little bit of help.

I'm looking for a new camcorder, simply for home movies. The only requirement I have is that it should record in true widescreen, and have good performance in low light (indoors - just standard room lighting etc.)

I've narrowed it down to two models, the Canon MV930, and the Sony HC44.

Please let me know what you think of these two models, and which one would be better.

I'm also going to buy a DVD Recorder, so that I can copy all the films that are made, straight onto DVD. Do you think this is a better option than buying a DVD Camera.

I'm hoping to spend upto about £350 - £400 on the miniDV camera, and then around £100 on the recorder, or £500 if you think that a DVD camera may be better.

I'm currently leaning toward the Canon and DVD Recorder combo.

Many many thanks in advance to you all.

John_LG

I have the model down from that Canon one, and we are very happy with it. Easy to use, comfortable, light, etc. Quality is great. Don't know the other model, but they are probably very similar.
We use the firewire port on our PC to download, edit, and then burn to DVD with our PC's DVD RW.
Are you sure you don't want to do even a little bit of editting? Can be great fun, and you'd still have the option of burning directly to DVD if you were short on time. Adding music, titles, overlays, cutting out the rubbish, special effects, and have a menu page to jump to different parts...
Just a thought.

Kentish

If you're comparing the Sony HC44 with the Canon MV930, then the Canon looks the better deal because it has 25x optical zoom (vs 12x for Sony) and is much cheaper (roughly £230 for Canon vs £320 for Sony) unless you can find a better price elsewhere. However, the Sony could be better for low light filming because it reportedly has a minimum light rating of 0 lux (pitch black?!) whereas the Canon is 2 lux. I'd take these figures with a large pinch of salt though - they are probably equally good/bad in low light.

Personally though, I would go for last year's model (Feb 2005) from Canon - the basic but good MV800 which also shoots true 16:9 widescreen. It only has a 20x zoom and a slightly smaller LCD screen (2.4" vs 2.7") but I can't see that much else that Feb 2006's MV930 has that I would want to pay extra for. Except for still image capability that is - the MV800 doesn't have it but last year's MV830 and MV850 do. Still photos are better with a digital camera though so I'm not fussed by this omission.

But here's the clincher for me: because the MV800/830/850 are now old models, you can get them for a snip, especially if you get them from the Canon Outlet on eBay - you can get refurbished models with full 1-year warranty for less than £150 including postage. Actually, the last 5 models posted went for between £118-£147 + £5.99 p&p. The Canon Outlet is legit - I've bought several camcorders and cameras from there and all of them have been flawless.

Finally, regarding DVD camcorders - I would steer clear for now for 3 reasons:
(1) they're more expensive
(2) they're more fragile than mini-DV camcorders (allegedly), and
(3) DVD (and hard drive) camcorders save the video in more highly compressed formats (mpeg2 or mpeg4) which are apparently not as good as miniDV which saves it as the less-compressed DV-AVI. This is especially important if you want to edit and re-render video footage - already highly compressed formats will degrade noticeably when re-rendered. Here's an excerpt from a recent review from https://www.camcorderinfo.com:
"...the compression level for video footage recorded to MiniDV cassette tape will be the standard 25 Mbps rate. This slight compression is what currently makes the MiniDV format superior to the heavily compressed footage (8 Mbps) recorded with hard disk drive and DVD format camcorders. At nearly twice the price, DVD camcorders are nowhere near the video quality found on low-end point-and-shoot MiniDV camcorders. This disparity should make users concerned about video quality and budget think twice before looking at a DVD camcorder." (Full article, which was a review of the latest entry-level Canon, can be found here)

iamnew

Thanks very much for the replies - You have given me a lot to think about!

Shent

I agree with Kentish. Bought a Canon MV830 and a Canon A520 from the Canon outlet on Ebay a couple of months ago they came in there original boxes with 12 months warranty and both where totally unmarked and work great. The MV830 was £138 inc shipping and the A520 was £98 inc shipping

speedyjoe

We bought a Canon MVX330i last year from Ebuyer at quite a discount. Price went up £50 after we ordered, so it was probably a missprice. This seems to happen a lot on ebuyer consumer electronics so it's always worth looking in their shop if you are after a particular model.

I would not hesitate to recommend Canon to anyone looking for a camcorder, ours is a fantastic camera.