The world of high definition camcorders is a jungle and especially if you are shopping for your first video camera. You don’t want to buy to cheap because now that you have decided to spend the money, you don’t want to buy a poor quality product, but on the other hand you’re probably not looking to buy an expensive professional Full HD Camcorder either. So what you’re looking for is high quality at the cheapest possible price, right?
There are 4 or 5 major producers of the HD camcorder camera and the all the rest. But to be on the safe site you should start off with a product from either Canon, JVC, Polaroid or Panasonic. Some will argue that you can look at the Sony Camcorders as well, but I would recommend one of the first four.
Before you even start your search, you should make up your mind about what price range you have. You will always be able to find better camcorders, but you’re probably not going to need something like the Panasonic AG-HPX500PJ that will cost you about $11,500 or more, but on the other hand you’re probably not going to be satisfied with the small DGX 567v camcorder that sells for around $70.
Besides the price, one of the things that you should consider is whether you would want a model that comes with a flash and whether you want it to record to a hard drive or a DVD. Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages. The great thing about a HDD (hard disk drive) is that you can record many hours of high quality video without running out of space.
You can find a camcorder that will come with as much as 100GB of disc space, which should be more than enough for several hours of high definition recording. The negative aspect of this is that since the hard drive is built in, when you’re out of space there is nothing you can do but download the videos to your computer.
If, on the other hand, you go for a DVD or a MiniDV (digital tape recording) model, you can easily replace the storage (if you have new and empty DVDs or tapes with you). The negative aspect is that you can’t store as much on these types of media as you can on the hard drive.
Some other aspects that you would want to consider is things like LCD Screen Size, Battery life, Optical Zoom and CCD Quantity and Size. But these aspects are all rather technical and if this is your first HD camcorder, you probably do not have an opinion on that yet.
So once you have thought about the different key elements mentioned about, you will want to find camcorder reviews on websites that are showing all video cameras (Canon, JVC, Polaroid, Panasonic and Sony), but more importantly will give you a massive amount of user ratings.
One of the best sites for such a comparison of high definition camcorders with tons of user ratings and comments is Amazon’s Camcorder Section. What I especially like about Amazon, is that you’ll get not only the positive reviews and ratings, but you will also see all the complaints and problems that regular users have had. Those are worth a lot more than all the technical comparison that some sites will give you.