Travel Technology - Digital Video - Hard Disk v Portable Storage

People,

I am in the market to upgrade our old VHS video camera, and was wondering about your collective thoughts on hard drive versus removable/portable storage cameras.

High Definition is not an influencer(?) upon my eventual choice, as this camera will be used for typical family stuff - and we don't have a HD TV anyway!

Cost (as always) is a consideration, as is our location in AUS. Plenty of OS trips will allow for duty free purchases if necessary :D

I tried searching, but was unable to get anything recent that was worhtwhile...it could have been by search criteria though!!

Thanks in advance...

GB

Bump :)

People,
I am in the market to upgrade our old VHS video camera, and was wondering about your collective thoughts on hard drive versus removable/portable storage cameras.


I'd have a go at answering but I'm not sure what you mean by "removable/portable storage cameras".

Did you mean hard drive vs. Mini-DV(tape)/DVD-RW video cameras?

I think they both have their advantages, though I have used a bunch of HDD cams recently and convince-wise, they win out just for the ease of transferring material. The largest problem with them is that the HD versions just eat up the storage space on your computers hard drive like no tomorrow. You are going to need to be buying lots of external drives if you want to archive raw material whereas with a DV tape you can just store the tape.

Easy:

For standard definition video, and all things being equal, miniDV will always have better quality than hard disk, DVD or SSD storage. The latter is temporally compressed, uses higher compression ratios and uses lower bandwidth. The former does not use temporal compression, has higher bandwidth and lower compression ratios. MiniDV also offers the advantage of automatic archiving of raw footage.

Note, however, that this is predicated upon "all things being equal." Of equal importance to video quality is sensor size and density (which effects both quality and low-light performance) and lens quality. Small, dense sensors with cheap lenses will produce lousy video regardless of the storage medium employed.

For HD, the answer is more complicated but, since you're not interested in HD, I won't go into it here.