Planning on buying the Panasonic NV-GS75E Mini DV Digital Camcorder, a friend of mine told me to check whether it has "DV in/out via Firewire/ i link port"
I couldn't find this information in the specs on ebuyer or google. I'd be very gratefull if anyone knows.

Thanks.

[MarkE19]

Well I've just had a look on the Panasonic web site and found the GS75B which I would think would be the same specs as the GS75E ('E' normally means its a European model and 'B' a British model).

The listed specs Here state that the GS75B has DV-out only

Mark.

Thanks for the help Mark. The guy who told me check, said the camera should act "as a bridge Digital Analogue and Monitoring" I'm not sure what he means but how will only having DV-out affect my ability to edit and produce films?

[MarkE19]

DV-out only will mean that you can use the camcorder as normal to film whatever you want and then capture the video to a PC via firewire. What you wont be able to do is copy the edited video back to a new DV tape for archiving and you wont be able to connect an analogue device such as VCR or old Hi8 etc camcorder to the new cam to use as an analogue to digital converter to get the analogue tapes onto the PC for editing or archiving to a DV tape.

Mark.

For someone who's only looking to make amateur films out of interest rather than for comercial gain would it be a mistake to buy a camera without dv-in?
I imagine I'll be editing on the computer and burning footage to dvd rather than archiving anything in analogue.

[MarkE19]

The problem with archiving to DVD is that DVD is no good for long term archiving as the discs get damaged far too easily. Therefore you can do the editing and then copy the footage back to a new DV tape for safe archiving if you have DV-in on the cam. You then just need to recapture and burn a new disc when the old one dies, rather than starting again from scratch - assuming you still have the origional DV tape.

Mark.

Thanks you've been really helpful, I'll definitely take what you said into consideration.