DV Camera Help?

[Sasq]

I know its short notice, but well I'm sorry blame my significant other.

We're back of to Australia in about 12 hours for our wedding ceremony - yay.

We'd like to dump it to a dvd later for preservation etc etc.

Currently I have a 3 year old PAL sony handycam and RRG. We're thinking of getting a DV camera. What brand/model etc right now I don't care about as much what are my minimum requirements in a good camera.

Firewire, what pixel count for moving/still shots is the minimum for pretty good quality. (while I'd like broadcast quality, that isn't going to happen, not with how much we got spare). And yes i know the more the better but thats not doable right now.

Anything else I need to look for, sadly we very rarely get the same model as you guys here, usually we get a few models to your one, so specific model numbers probably won't do me any good.

Thanks Dan

[az]

Be sure it has DV IN, not only out (DV, FireWire, IEEE1394, i.Link are all the same, but I think you knew that before).

AZ

[Dr Mordrid]

I've had real good luck with the Panasonics and the Canon Elura, but as AZ noted make sure it has bi-directional IEEE-1394.

The latest models of the Sony Digital8's are pretty good as economy models because they have the most features/$$ and they use the cheaper Hi8 tapes. Just make sure the models are recent and not those from the first year or so's production.

Dr. Mordrid

[Sasq]

Yeah looking at this one, but sorry guys you probably can't read it (i can't read that much of it either this early in the morning)

Dan

[Sasq]

as a conlusion I bought this http://www.dvspot.com/reviews/sony/t...ew/index.shtml

I'll let you know how it goes

Dan

[Brian Ellis]

If you can afford it, Panasonic have some excellent 3-CCD models with almost broadcast quality because of good lenses.

[Snake-Eyes]

Nice, Sasq. I have the (now discontinued) TRV20, and I like 4 of the new features of your camcorder that mine doesn't have:

1) The Spot focus
2) The laser-metered focusing mechanism for stills
3) The higher resolution for stills (mine's 1 megapixel)
4) The touch screen (I'm a sucker for gimmicks like that).

Despite what that review says to criticize the still mode, I've found that if you have adequate lighting and shoot only subjects within 20-40 feet, the camera's stills are very good. In poor lighting my pictures get a lot of noise (yours may not be so bad, thanks to the second thing I listed above, but this is also why I opted for the Sony combination movie / flash add-on light).

Let us know how it goes.

And congratulations! (on the wedding)

[Gear]

Sasq: be sure to buy only miniDV's tapes with memory - there should be a logo: CM, for 4k or 16k models, and 3 gold plated contacts, right under the write protect switch (it's yellow on the pic on that review). With this memory, you can add titles to your scenes, the whole tape, and date/time, very useful when, for example, you want to use the End Search function, which rewinds your tape exactly to the end of the scene, and plays back 5 seconds before that, so that you can start recording with no gaps in between.

My father has the DCR-TRV16E model, which is cheaper and with fewer stuff/lower specs, and I have some issues with capturing through DV, showing motion trails/skipping effect, see http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36133.

Anyway, it's a nice piece of hardware you got there.
Oh, and congrats for your wedding!