[Ikki]

The camcorders are for high school use.

The first is for use by anyone, they may have no real experience. It needs to be a very easy to use camcorder with decent output that records to a built in dvd (stated requirement).

The second is for use by students in GCSE level multimedia work and two features required are good quality HD and record to an HDD. Price about £600-£700.

It may simplify things if they are both the same make.

I haven't looked at camcorders for a long time, so I don't know what's hot at the moment as models change so quickly.

[redsox_mark]

For the second one (HD on HDD), Canon HG10 is generally seen as the leader; or the Sony SR7/SR8.

[senu]

I would agree with that.
However, Hi def on HDD is AVCHD.
The HG 10 does not have SD option but it is in most other ways very good and the Students will take to it very quickly
As elegant as that idea is I would hope the school has invested in some Modern PCs and New software
My experience of schools is that they generally do not have cutting edge hardware although this can be remedied by specific need
As an aside I was browsing in Currys this evening and was appalled to see how costly the mini DVDs were.
I got 50 DVD-Rs for £9.99 just last week.
A pack of 3 of those MiniDVDs were going for £10 at Currys!.. Maybe Currys is the wrong place to buy them...

[Ikki]

Thanks for the suggestion. Fortunately as the new course fits in with our new school specialism there is plenty of funding for hardware and software. I was just told to get a camcorder for the course, they don't seem bothered about the cost, but I feel that I have to keep things sensible.

The dvd camcorder is a specific request for elsewhere in the school. If that's what they want, then they can have it. I thought that the Canon DC50 looked like a good choice.