How do recording formats differ?

How do recording formats differ?

Tim Smith (Camcorder Training Specialist) gives expert video advice on: How do types of camcorders differ?; What are the pros and cons of camcorders that record directly to mini-dv?; What are the pros and cons of camcorders that record directly to DVD? and more...

When a consumer goes looking for a camcorder these days, they're going to have a lot of choices. They're going to see things like mini-DV tape, which is a tape format, or a DVD format to record directly to the DVD. Also, there is hard-drive recording these days, and there's a thing called flash recording. Essentially mini-DV tape probably is going to put you in a price range that's affordable, and still it's a very effective way of recording large amounts of information. Moving, then, up to a DVD, which is really about convenience, being able to take your disk out of a camera and put it directly into the DVD disk, and then just play it on your home DVD player, which we all have. Of late, a hard drive camera is becoming more popular, and that's a fixed-drive system inside a camera, which records everything just inside the camera, there's no removable media. Then that information could be moved to a computer or some other format for viewing or editing. And then the flash cameras, which record on a flash memory, a memory which is solid state, no moving parts. Those tend to make the camera lighter, but the down side to that is the record-time is pretty limited.