Canon MV750i

Dannykos

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Hi all - new to this forum, but am (probably) about to buy the Canon MV750i

We're having a baby in a couple of months and thought it about time we got a camcorder to record all those "precious moments" etc :eek:

Main concerns are really size / weight / connectivity with my apple powerbook etc. really want a mini dv format.

**incidentally - why aren't there any camcorders with hard discs in?? i mean, the ipod has a 40 gig drive... so why not a camcorder??**

anyhow - will probably buy the above model in the next few days for £354 in vat from pixmania.com, unless someone strongly advises against it :D
 
Sounds like a good buy, you'll need a firewire cable on top of that (4 pin>4pin probably) and then you're up and running. Don't count too much on the digital stills feature, it's pretty absic quality, otherwise a good cam, better zoom over the 700i (though how much less is this?).

Do be aware that Pixmania are a french company, operating from france, should there be any problems with the cam canon uk may not honour the warranty, meaning a trip back to france. I'd maybe have a look at uk companies prices, if its not much more it may be a better bet. Also Jessops do internet price matching with uk companies, so they probably wont match pixmania but should match anybody else, again the serivce is likely to be better from a shop than a website, let alone a foreign website.

HDD cams are coming in at the top end of the market, Sony have launched a broadcast system and there is a bolt on system now available which will fit onto most broadcast size cams.

The problems are space, stability & reliability (consumer end products would have to be made a lot less expensive to be a viable option). A miniDV tape can hold up to 18gb in LP mode and costs £3 (if you shop around and but in bulk), if you have a big job on you might go through 10 tapes before you get back to the edit suite, so you need big portable drives to offer the same space.

Once you have soemthing on tape it is usually pretty safe, hard drives are more prone to damage, file corruption, if the power fails before the file is closed you could lose your data etc. The pro bolt on system seems to offer the best of both worlds in that you can reocrd on your cams tape and output through the firewire or SDi to the drive at the same time.

A spinning hard drive will also be quite sore on battery power and for a practical size would probably make the camcorder bigger. The advent of big solid state SD cards is seen by some as the way forward as camera size could be reduced, but there are still reliability problems.

One benefit of the HDD/SD system is that the transfer of footage from the camera to the edit suite can be done a lot more quickly than the 'real-time' method we mainly use at the minute.

In short the technology is there, it needs a bit more developing for the home market, at the moment you are doing the right thing by buying minidv.
 
thanks for the sound advice - will see if i can find similar UK prices instead! I find it really annoying that there seems to be soooo many different models of camcorder out there from each manufacturer.... not exactly a consumer friendly environment if you ask me!! It just means that you have to get the full specs of each one and the compare the small print - just to discover that model A has 1 more small button on it - so you can insert a smiley face graphic or whatever - than model B.

ah well - better to get advice from here than asking over the counter at dixons :)
 
Did you buy the Canon and if so where

Have you tried http://www.nomatica.com/

Do not anything about them apart from a friend who bought from them

Anyone know if they are a UK company
 
still haven't bought a cam - going to go to costco to get a feel for some of them. wife wants to hold one and see which ones she likes in the flesh first! hmmmmm this is taking too long :(
 
i recently bought a 750i and am very pleased with it. forget the useless digital zoom, the optical zoom is excellent.

with the 750i you also get a wide angle adaptor with helps indoors.

the stills photos are good enough for websites and samll pictures, but can't be blown up very well.

the only real downside is the noise it makes. if you record in a quite room, you pick up the motor wirr quite noticably.

battery life from the one supplied is only about an hour but i picked up a couple of huge batteries and a car charger of ebay quite cheaply
 

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