I have a HC90 which is awesome, but would like to have archived HD rather than SD for future editing. I went to the store today to try out a HDR-HC9 but couldn't find one. The guy at HH Gregg told me no one buys miniDV HD and they don't carry them (he praised JVC and Panasonic -- said you couldn't record HD on a minDV... wow). So I tried CC.... they only had the Canon (which I really didn't like the twitchy toggle -- but great price).

Are TAPES just not cool? Aren't tapes still the highest quality available?

Seems to me with a miniDV you have an instant archive. You don't need to edit or transfer the footage right away (just shelf it for another day). You don't need to worry as much about deleting the content nor worry about HD failure. Even archiving, I don't want to trust a single hard external drive to house years of video and how often do I need to spin up the drive to keep it working, etc, etc...

Am I missing something? Really interested in going HD soon.

I don't know anything about HD, but I know that tapes are still the recommended media on this message board. And I trust the people here more than I do the hhgregg dude.

RE archiving...as you said, I don't trust one single media...I use USB drives but have multiple backups on multiple USB hard drives in multiple locations. The more the merrier, as they say. (Yes, I'm o/c & anal!)

High Definition camcorders which use the "High Definition Video" HDV format use MiniDV tapes.




Rich

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FireWire Survey

Nope. Tapes are good enough for pros, so they're good enough for me.

The guy at the store is an idiot. Quelle surprise.

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Adam
Proud owner of 8 Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

(giggling)