Any Have An Hd Video Cam?

[PeteZahut]

I have been looking lately at the Sony Hi-Def video camera (HDR-SR7 HDD) and was wondering if anyone else out there has one. Any likes/dislikes or anything like that I would really like to hear about it. Because I am looking a t dropping >$1000 I want to make sure I know as much as I can and I find hearing what people like or dislike really helps iron out some things. Thanks in advance.

[fishinhogdaddy]

I have been looking lately at the Sony Hi-Def video camera (HDR-SR7 HDD) and was wondering if anyone else out there has one. Any likes/dislikes or anything like that I would really like to hear about it. Because I am looking a t dropping >$1000 I want to make sure I know as much as I can and I find hearing what people like or dislike really helps iron out some things. Thanks in advance.

Go buy a Consumer Reports Buying Guide.

I use this almost exclusivley for any big ticket items I buy. You can depend on the advice they give.

FHD

[lethfisher]

Hey Pete,

 

The college I work at bought a Sony HDR-HC5, it shoots in 1080i. Pretty sweet camera with all the bells and whistles. Haven't played with it too much but enough to review it.

 

First off the HD is excellent and looks very crisp. There is an HDMI connector on it to plug direct into the TV. The LCD screen is big and is a touch screen which is suprisingly fun to use and accurate on your touches. There is a multitude of shooting modes, HD or not, photos, widescreen, etc so quite versitile. This one has a night vision mode which is really cool, kinda blair witch project feel about it haha There is on screen battery meter so you know how much time you have left shooting, or just in standby. It is a pretty long battery life, we'll see how long it lasts though. The photo feature is a 4 mega pix camera that shoots direct to memory stick duo. With the sony brand it will only take sony memory sticks.

 

It shoots to HDV which I recommend over the newer hard drive and DVD ones, the tapes are more versitiles and capture almost better than the Hard drives do. Plus if you drop the camera you don't have to worry about your Hard drive being erased accidently. You also can create an archive with tapes. DVD's are very compressed and terrible for editing on the computer with.

 

It has firewire and USB out to the computer and component, RCA cable and HDMI out to the TV.

 

Overall the HD is nice but I couldn't really justify spending that much more for it. May as well get a high end DV camera and it should work well for you. If most of the video you are shooting will go onto the web it will get compressed down quite a bit anyway.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Any other questions? Try Cnet.com for camera reviews, they are pretty good about it.

[PeteZahut]

Thanks for the info. I haven't spent as much time on the reviews as I probably should have. I thought about DV but then I thought I would end up burning it to DVD at some point anyways and then I wouldn't have to bother with tapes. I agree that the quality of DV is probably better due to not having to compress to the harddrive or DVD but I figured that I could live with it.

 

I will probably end up buying it and maybe write my own review. Perhaps next summer you will see a link on here to some video I shoot.

[esleech]

I've got a sanyo xacti HD video cam. Nice and small, 5.1 mp, 10x zoom, 100x digital zoom. It's been good to me so far, and I paid LESS than a grand for it.

[rusty]

I bought a Canon ZR60 MiniDV cam a few years back because I was too anxious to do the research. I've been generally happy with it but had I looked around a little more, I think I could have got a better cam for the money.

 

I would recommend chatting with the folks at London Drugs and The Camera Store before you make a decision. Have found that you rarely get steered wrong there as long as the salesperson knows the score.

 

I have found tapes to be a pain in the ass sometimes - but if you shoot on the highest quality settings then you are losing no information at all. Don't really see the point of shooting in HD only to immediately compress it to DVD format.