Old school Mini-dv vs hard drive based camcorder

[rdsii64]

I have a basic standard definition hard drive based camcorder. The reason I bought it is because on one of the my trips to the desert the wind blew my old camcorder that used the mini-dv tapes over and it landed on a rock and is no more.
What I can't quite come to grips with is why the video quality of the old mini-dv was noticably better than the hard drive based cam corder I now own. it is so much better that I lately have been checking out ebay for another one.

My question is are the old mini-dv camcorders that good or do I just need to get a better hard drive based one.

[matteusclement]

see my quote and it will explain the compression part of things.

HDD camcorders use highly compressed algorithms to fit that much data onto the hard drive. This means that alot of data is "substituted" and guessed.

Mini DV, (which I am a fan of) holds just over 12 gigs of data and uses not such a compresses format. This is why you notice the quality difference.

But you definately have to chip in more change for the Hard drive ones to get the best image, and even then it's not that great for editting. Many will use H.264 encoding which is not the best for editting.

[Keebler]

Originally Posted by matteusclement

see my quote and it will explain the compression part of things.

HDD camcorders use highly compressed algorithms to fit that much data onto the hard drive. This means that alot of data is "substituted" and guessed.

Mini DV, (which I am a fan of) holds just over 12 gigs of data and uses not such a compresses format. This is why you notice the quality difference.

But you definately have to chip in more change for the Hard drive ones to get the best image, and even then it's not that great for editting. Many will use H.264 encoding which is not the best for editting.

matt, do you know if the newer flash card based camcorders use the same compression techniques as the HDD camcorders?

I'll eventually need a new one and am currently looking at the dslrs considering they have HD recording now. Some of the footage from the pentax K-7 and the canon eos 5D (quite a bit more financially) looks amazing.

[MisterMe]

Originally Posted by Keebler

matt, do you know if the newer flash card based camcorders use the same compression techniques as the HDD camcorders?

...

Whether or not they use the same compression techniques as HDD camcorders is besides the point. As a general proposition, flash-based camcorders are not intended to record editable video.