I'm looking for a good one. Not a cheap piece of garbage low-quality camcorder, but one that will actually take videos clearly. Looking for something like miniDV/MiniDVD, please post any you know or have...
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Good $200-350 camcorder compatible with Mac?
- Thread starter Mr. MacBook
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I would recommend a MiniDV unit (tapes) over a MiniDVD unit because the footage is higher quality (less compression) and much easier to edit. Pretty much any MiniDV camcorder is Mac-compatible. $200-350 is the bottom end of the performance spectrum though, i.e. "look at the wowie-zowie 500x zoom lens and the big huge LCD!" Nevermind that the lens has no wide-angle at all and you need a special lens (if it even has a lens mount) to be able to get more than 30 degrees of arc in the frame. The Sonys, Canons, Samsungs, JVCs, and all the rest in this price range are all made in China for the big box stores and are of similar levels of junkiness.
One feature I look for is AV-DV passthrough, which allows you to use the camera to digitize analog video from old videotapes etc. Any MiniDV camcorder can do this, but only the ones with AV-DV passthrough will digitize an analog signal and send it out thru firewire in real time. The rest require you to dub it to tape first.
One feature I look for is AV-DV passthrough, which allows you to use the camera to digitize analog video from old videotapes etc. Any MiniDV camcorder can do this, but only the ones with AV-DV passthrough will digitize an analog signal and send it out thru firewire in real time. The rest require you to dub it to tape first.