Any gadget hound will tell you that format wars are nothing new in the electronics industry. We know that the real casualties from these horrific conflicts are most often us hapless consumers. I like to draw the comparison of early adopters to the brave but tragic characters at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan...point being that sometimes it does not pay to be first person off the boat. But with the visual clarity and beauty of an HD picture, it's virtually impossible to resist the urge to be the first kid on the block with the shiny new HD camcorder. Well from my perspective you can go ahead and dive right on in!
The first thing you'll want to do is be familiar with the different methods of compression that are available, because these are your flavors and they are not brand specific. The HD available to us little guys consists of HDV, AVCHD, and DVCPRO. Now the major difference between all of these flavors is the capture method. HDV was traditionally tape based, but quite a few cameras are now tape-less and can capture the format via a hard drive or an SDHC card (Secure Digital High-Capacity). Both AVCHD and DVCPROHD are tape-less formats, and for the sake of this article we'll eliminate the DVCPRO from the discussion, as the P2 cards and cameras used to capture the format are more than most are willing to pay to capture the kids first steps. So this leaves us with HDV and AVCHD as our cornerstone formats for our first camera purchase, and the net is full of debates as to which one looks better. My answer? Both of them look great, fabulous, gorgeous even! And I doubt that anyone would be able to tell the difference between my tape based Canon HV30 vs. my Canon HF11 which uses the AVCHD compression scheme and an SDHC card.
The real kicker is how good they look next to my Panasonic HVX200, and often to me they "look" better. That's an annoying proposition as value of those cameras combined do not come close to equaling half cost of the Panasonic. I'll caution you with one caveat, the connection must be HDMI!!!!! That's the whole point of this article, the footage only looks as good as its connection so component connections are not going to get it. So grab yourself an HD camcorder and I mean any brand that says HD on it. Shoot some great footage with it and hook it up to your Plasma or LCD TV and I guarantee you'll be amazed. Next article we'll talk about the big things people are doing with these little cameras.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Greg
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