Has anyone got any recommendations for cheap but decent quality Hi Def camcorders? Don't really care whether it's a Hard Drive or Memory Stick based as it'll mainly be used around home to film the baby when it comes, so as soon as stuff is filmed it'll likely go onto a computer. Looking at under $1200, ideally under 1k or as little as possible but that's probably not realistic to get something that's actually decent.

All the freefall videographers around here are going nuts over the HDR-CX100, seems to be the golden standard.

I think it's around the $1000 mark, few of the blokes picked theres up for $800 or so.

Very impressive camera.

Ebay search

All the AusGamers videos ( http://www.ausgamers.com/videos/view.php/45411) are done with a Canon HF-10. We really like it (Term actually bought one for home use after checking it out).

They have a new model now (HG-11 maybe?). It does 1080 at 25p or something. It's dead easy to use, nice and light, easy to carry around, takes SDHC cards.

i bought a sony HDR-SR10 last year in thailand some amount of baht i can't remember and it's awesome. i'd definately recommend it.

pros: great picture, lightweight, two batteries, 5.1 sound. memory stick based. instant recording. composite, component out and hdmi connectors for your tv to watch all your dodgy camera work.

cons: each battery only has about 2 hours shooting time. no shaking filter (or i must just have a really jerky walk). 1080i recording (but really whats the diff between 1080i and p). only comes with a 4gb memory stick. need to charge the battery while plugged into the camera

the best thing about this camera is the picture. you can crank the quality right up and it makes full hd fta broadcasts look ordinary. the additional memory sticks can be expensive and somewhat hard to find (overseas) - they use sony sticks not the normal sd memory, although they fit quite a large amount of footage each. over 4 weeks i used about 30gb of storage including a few hundred 2mb photos.

sony has a habit of making you buy their blank stock to use with their products, I would definitly watch out for that with a sony camera.

Sony will also make you pay $110 to replace a scratched driver CD and not offer it as a free download.

Depending on what you want to use it for I find my JVC everio is the best for family sort of stuff (birthdays etc..) in all sorts of light conditions. I think they are about $1500.

yeah got a JVC here, it's the bomb.. they the ones that released HDD vid cams first aswell

I got the Canon HF10 from hardley normals today , got it down to $1177 with a 5 year warranty, charging now

$1177? the f***? I'm pretty sure I saw it at my local HN for $899 or $998 or something. Though I could be mistaken, looked at so many cameras that day.
edit: oh missed the warranty part. nice.

Oh yeah and a bonus with mine, I found out it has a 58mm lens thread on it so I thieved my 58mm UV filter off my old canon SLR lens, now I can use it out in the open (go kart, bike, etc) without worrying about bugs hitting the lens. Woot! Check out the end of yours & see what size thread it has, there might be a shutter that closes when the camera is off but no one ever thinks to have a protective cover when the camera is turned on (except SLR users who seem to do this all the time).

last edited by whoop at 16:45:13 30/Aug/09

yeah it was $1077 before the warranty, I went elsewhere but no one else could come close so maybe you were looking at a different model? Even clive peters had an ex-display model wanted $1260 for it

Oh this was on sale I think, my local HN is having a sale so yeah might have been a sale price or something. Have you tried it yet? Tell us how you go with trying to edit the video it gives you. Premiere CS4 is supposed to be able to open AVCHD but for all the trying I'm doing I can't get it to open it unless I use handbrake to re-encode it as an avi - h264 - ac3 audio so I don't think canon are sticking to the avchd standard when encoding. I've tried every mode the camera provides and still nothing.

I was going to try this and see how it goes but for the life of me I can't get ubuntu to run on my PC anymore, probably because I've got my drives RAID'd (I'm a RAID noob, windows just installed without any 3rd party driver disk which I thought was odd but I assume I need one for ubuntu?). I'm not game to install the software they give you after trog mentioned it crashed his computer in my AVCHD editing thread. HA!

I haven't gotten to the point of editing anything yet, all I did was take a short vid of bub and test it on the PC, doesn't view in media player classic but works fine in VLC and streams perfectly to the beyonwiz\tv