I had a sony camcorder (can not remember the name) years ago, which uses a miniDV tape. I was quite annoyed by this because the tape takes lots of time when you want to put the movie to PC.

Now the HDD camcorder is out, which is quite exciting. I just want to ask, is it really fast to copy the data from cam to PC?

What about the 'writing delay' of the nature of HDD when you are recording the film? Is it a problem?

Also, I saw some memory card HD camcorder from Panasonic and Sony recently, maybe this is another choice for easy movie production? (Of course the after-process is time-consuming anyway)

What do you think the HDD or memory card based camcorder?

(I will skip DVD-based camcorder because it is even worse than a tape... personally i don't like a disc spinning at a high speed when you are recording...)

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Yes, with a HDD cam, copying clips from the cam to the PC is much faster than with tape. Tape is real time; with a HDD cam it's as fast as the PC and HDD can handle - some small number of minutes to copy an hour of video.

Though for me, this is not that big of a deal. It depends on your workflow. See this post
Worth waiting for Sony HDR-CX6 when Panasonic HDC-SD1 much cheaper?

There are no issues with writing delay.
Flash memory based cams work in a similar way.

In general you get better quality for your money today with the tape based models. In the SD world, a DV tape cam in the same price range will generally outperform a HDD cam, though if you pay more you can get HDD cams which are better than a lower end DV model. With High Def, the models which use HDD or flash memory are AVCHD; again at a given price point the HDV tape models perform slightly better. Also AVCHD has limited (but improving) editing support.

I think i just hate tapes... Now I am looking at memory card based cam and HDD based ones.

Is the HDD camcorder quite noisy? I just want to find some reason to let me choose a memory card camcorder...

BTW, theere are other reasons that I prefer memory card camcorder(such as Panasonic HDC-SD1), is that there are tooo many HDD around us now... since I have already had a ipod 80G,and a HDD portable storage for my photography hobby...

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HDD cams aren't very noisy at all, though they have moving parts so make some noise.

Personally - whilst I'm happy with tape for now, I too find flash memory cams more appealing than HDD. Why?

- HDDs can get full. With a memory card, you can always buy another if you aren't near your PC to download.

- HDDs can fail.

On the other hand, with a HDD cam you can shoot for hours without having to change anything; with a memory based one you'll need to replace the card. (Eventually we'll see larger cards supported, so this becomes less of an issue).

Note the editing software I use (Sony Vegas) currently supports AVCHD only on Sony cams; but the Panasonic support should be comming soon. I think some of the other packages may be Panasonic friendly already.

Thank you very much for the information.

Well the choice between flash memory or HDD version depends on different situation. But as you said, you can always transfer the content in a SD/MS to a portable media, just as we did about the DSLR.

I guess AVCHD is developed by both sony and panasonic? but they are different? My only concern is that if I can put the clip (though memory card or burn on DVD) into the PS3 and play it? even the footage from Panasonic? (I used to edit footage a lot, but finding that it is quite timeconsuming and complicated anyway...)

Currently , there are not many flash card camcorders in the market. As far as I know, panasonice HDC-SD1, and the new sony HDR-CX6 (or HDR-CX7) are quite good. The first one is available now but the latter is coming this July.

Any opnion about these two cams?

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Yes, AVCHD was jointly developed by Sony and Panasonic, so we thought it was standard between the two of them. Then Sony's Creative Software Division released AVCHD support in their Vegas editor only to say this only works for Sony cams (much to the dissapointment of Panasonic owners). Sony has said they will eventually support Panasonic as well.

So I don't know if there are issues with the PS3 playing Panasonic AVCHD or not. With a Google search you can probably find out.

The SD1 is pretty good; a good article and comparison here

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content...JVC-GZ-HD7.htm

I expect the new Sony models to be similar in performance to the Panasonic.