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Best consumer camcorder if you can live with tapes.

HDV has better image quality than the more highly compressed AVCHD used in HDD, DVD, and memory card based cameras.

But it's much more of a pain to use.

There is no perfect camcorder on the market today. With HDV more time needs to be spent importing video from tapes but it takes almost 5 times less time to encode final video then AVCHD based format. Tapes also cheap and good for long time archiving.

if it isnt 3ccd, its gonna suck

#3, actually, not. Though the 3ccd will give a color rendition advantage in lower light.

If you want to deal with Amazon they have it for $587 shipped (549 last week).


http://www.amazon.com/Canon-HV30-Definition-Camcorder-Stabilized/dp/B00114PN1U/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1228951242&sr=8-1

#3 simply not true. These cameras have great color rendition and good low light performance (for a consumer camera). They use a CMOS chip which is larger than a CCD chip. The larger image area gives them their light gathering advantage. Consumer 3 chip cameras tend to use very small CCDs with a resolution smaller than the final picture. They then interpolate the final image between them. The smaller image area also leads to a poor low light performance. All higher end consumer cameras now use CMOS chips and even some of the lower end Pro cameras have made the switch.

Absolutely excellent camera. I'd get it from Amazon though.

nice camera something i want

I would wait till Christmas, it might lower even more.

NO TAPE

This is the best camcorder you can buy. You can spend $1000 more on other models and you will not get better video quality.

Yes, tape sucks. But DVD will store only 20 minutes, where as minidv will store 60 minutes in SP mode. I suppose a HD will be better.