The time has come for something lighter and easier to make movies with. After checking out what's on the market in the camcorder world these days, I find myself torn between a hard disk or mini dv storage camcorder.

I'm definitely interested in HD and 1080i, but what's everyone recording to and what do you like and dislike about it?

Thanks for your time and opinions!

My ... I didn't even realize the SD card had grown to this! Definitely a viable option for me. Truly appreciate the information and I'm going to study up on the HDC-SD9. Need something compact and light to use "all the time", so to speak.

Feb 13, 2009 -- 1:24AM, The Calandro Family wrote:

We are loving our Panasonic HDC-SD9 camcorder. No hard drive at all, it records directly to an SD card. We can get quite a bit of video on one card and we can pop the card right into the SD slot on the television to watch it. Not having a hard drive makes the camera VERY light and simple to use. Because of its size and lightweight design, we find that we use it WAY more than our old Hi-8 camera. The SD card is convenient, and transferring video to my computer is quick and simple.

The quality of the picture on this camera is outstanding- full 1080p HD and 5.1 surround sound. It has some outstanding features like the "pre-record" button that allows you to never miss an event! The only drawback is that our model does not have a built in light, so I would look for that. The image stabilization is a nice feature.

Editing in HD definitely takes more time and will chew up memory on the computer, but the picture quality makes it worth it!

We admit that we're a little biased towards the Panasonic equipment as one of their LiHD families, but this really is an outstanding camera and everyone who has seen the picture quality has been astounded by it.

 

 

Feb 17, 2009 -- 9:14AM, HDshewuk wrote:

My current camera is a mini DVD one.  I love it as I can drop the DVD straight into the player/computer but, as I am always looking for smaller/lighter, the SD card looks a great option for me. 

The mini DVD disks hold 30mins of recording. What size SD card would hold this amount in high quality?

I use an 8Gig SD card (I've seen them avertised for $20) and get MUCH more than 30 minutes of HD video on it! Definitely worth the upgrade!

Enjoy Keven and be sure to share!!

Thanks for the info on the SD card capacity!  I will definitely look into upgrading to this, soon.  Let us know how the camera performs, Keven!