Originally Posted by
wsbombers
Thanks for the candid response. That's why I asked.
Based on the review at the site you mentioned, those two seemed like the best. I'm certainly open to other suggestions, though. Is there a better review site to look at? Cnet seemed to like both of those models too. ~8 out of 10 ratings.
I am probably going to mostly use it casually at home, for sports, and for when I travel. Some of it will be indoors. I probably want something that can shoot in high definition since that's going to be the standard. I need at least 10X optical zoom. It's my understanding the HD and DVD models aren't quite there yet and that I need to find a model that writes to tape. Is that incorrect? Reasonably small and light weight are important. I don't need a professional model, but I would like to be able to do some controls manually when I feel like it.
I'll then probably use the footage to make dvds with tmpEng or some similar software.
Couple of points:
1. Sports are high-motion activities. The higher the compression of the capture medium, the more motion artifacts you'll experience. The more motion in the scene, the more motion artifacts in a high compression medium. I'd suggest you actually try an AVCHD machine before buying one, as the arbitrarily-limited bandwidth results in very high compression rates and significant motion artifacts.
2. Shooting indoors is going to be an issue regardless of the camera that you buy. "Small camera" and "good low light performance" are mutually exclusive -- the smaller the sensor, the less sensitive the camera in low-light.
3. I think you mean "tmpgenc." Tmpgenc is a great product -- I use it myself for transcoding standard definition video to mpeg2. However, my understanding is that, though it will transcode HDV (and not AVCHD), it only burns DVDs, i.e. standard definition, and not HD DVDs (BluRay or HD-DVD). If what you want is to produce standard definition DVDs, why would you get an AVCHD or HDV camcorder?