how good is the video quality of Mpeg4?

Question

would like to buy a mpeg4 video recorder or shoud i buy a mini dv recorder?

Answer 1

Quality is not coming for free.
DV has better quality , but a higher bit rate (so bigger file sizes).
MPEG4 comes into 2 flavors; part 2 and part 10 (or H.264).
H.264 yields the best quality at a given bit rate, but most probably your MPeg4 is part 4.