Expert Guide To Dvd Camcorders
By Kenny Hemphill, Wed Dec 7th

Thinking about a mini DVD camcorder? You're not alone, it's arapidly growing sector of the market, with Hitachi,Sony and Panasonic all making more than one mini dvd camcorder.

These camcorders differ from regular digital video cameras inone important way - they record video onto mini DVD discs,rather than DV tape. This has a number of advantages. DVD discsare more robust than tape and won't get chewed up in the camera.Although this is thankfully a rare occurance, it scares me everytime I here a strange noise coming from my camcorder, so it'swith bearing in mind.

The second advantage is that DVD discs are random access,compared to tape on which everything is recorded sequentially.This means that there's no need to rewind and fast forward tofind the clip you're after, just select it from the menu. Somecameras even allow you to perform basic editing functionson-camera. An additional side-benefit is that a mini DVDcamcorder doesn't have tape heads to get worn or dirty ashappens in regular mini DVD cameras.

And thirdly, you can easily watch your home movies by removingthe DVD from the camera and playing it in practically any DVDplayer.

However, there are negative factors to. The most siginificantone is that video is encoded as MPEG-2 on a mini DVD camcorder,as opposed to DV format. This means that it needs specialistsoftware to edit - you can't just use your regular video editingprogram (unless it specifically supports MPEG-2). And if a Macuser you're out of luck, as there are no MPEG-2 editingapplications for the Mac.

Also, mini DVD camcorders tend to cost more than similarlyspecified mini DV cameras. And the media is also more expensive.However, if you don't intend editing your movies and don't mindthe extra cost, a mini dvd does offer extraordinaryconvenience.

About the author:Kenny Hemphill is the editor and publisher of The HDTV Tuner