I need to record from existing VHS tapes to digital and wanted to get some recommendations on what digital camcorder to use.

Ideally, I'd like the camcorder to have AV outputs too so that I could see on the TV what was being recorded. I believe this is called pass-through?

I'm not adverse to buying a used model or committed to any particular format, other than digital.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!
toddmanqa

You will need a device that has analouge inputs. I prefer using a miniDV camcorder with analouge inputs and "pass-thru" features.

Alas, in minaturization there is not enough "real estate" on camcorder bodies to give the user separate inputs and outputs anymore. (And often you must use a dongle or patch cord to get the regular RCA jacks from a 4 conductor mini-phone plug.)

Not all camcorders with analogue inputs can send the digitized video directly to a computer. Analouge vidoe inputs are composite and/or s-video -- use s-video for slightly higher quality if your source device (VCR,camcorder, laserdisk, etc.) has it. With some camcorders, you can simultaneously feed analogue into it and have the camcorder pass the digital video to a computer over the Firewire interface. This is called "pass-thru" and camcorders without it will require you to first record onto the camcorder tape the analouge input, then later you play the tape back and the camcorder send the DV to the computer. Pass-thru camcorders don't even need the tape present and it saves time.

Because few camcorders have SEPERATE inputs and outputs, monitoring a recording they way you asked about is not common. My camcorder has analogue inputs and outputs, but they are shared. However, my camcorder also has "pass-thru" so what I do is hook my analogue source up to the analouge jacks (functioning as inputs) and hook the camcorder to a computer using Firewire and watch/monitor the digitalization and transferring to the PC on the PC! This is the end result I want anyway.

In this post I am primarily talking about DV camcorders that use Digital8 or MiniDV tapes. The mini DVD recording MPEG2 camcorders will work similarily, but will encode the video to MPEG2 rather than unencoded non-lossy DV and they will use USB rather than Firewire.

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