Do Hdd camcorders compare well with mini-dv?

Question

Image quality being the main criteria.

Answer 1

No, if image quality is the main criteria. HDD cameras use mpeg-2 compression to squeeze all that picture information onto a hard drive. Mpeg-2 compression works by saving main frames, and then the rest as changes to those frames. For example, in a set of 30 frames, maybe two (every 15 frames) frames are "main frames" containing all the picture information. The rest of the frames would be "partial frames," that is, every area that changed would be shown by the new frame, but every area that didn't change (i.e. a tree), would still be the "main frame." Now this works great if you are recording a talking head, but since most of our videos don't exactly involve sticking a tripod in front of a tree, there will be quality loss in shots with lots of motion. miniDV, on the other hand, compresses each frame as if it were an individual picture, so all the picture information is there in every frame, not to mention it has a higher bit rate of 25 Mb/s, whereas the highest for Mpeg-2 is usually 8.5 Mb/s. Of course, this is just saying that the format is better; an $700 HDD camera will probably have better overall video performance than a $200 miniDV camera, due to sensor size, effective pixels, lens. etc. If you plan on editing, then miniDV is the best way to go. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I have used Mini-DV cameras for a while now and happy with the quality. The HDD cameras use a compression format -MPEG2 to squeeze the info onto the hard drive. If you are doing home use, then HDD should be fine , otherwwise go with Mini-DV or one step up Mini-DV HD