What are the pros and cons of camcorders that record directly to a hard drive?

What are the pros and cons of camcorders that record directly to a hard drive?

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...

Probably the newest format on the market is camcorders that feature hard drives to record their media. One of the advantages to it is that there is no media. The camcorder comes with a preset amount of memory in the camera that you record video. So, that's a plus but that's also a minus because at some point you fill those up and you have to do something with that video. So, because you're recording onto a hard drive, you do actually have to add in one more step whether you want to edit it or however you want to archive it. You're going to have to record to something so there's really an additional step there. You have the convenience of a lot of record time in your hand without having to worry about bringing media with you and then a little bit of inconvenience because you have to add one more step to archive it.