HD camcoders

If format proliferation is the sign of growing pains in a market, camcorders are in adolescent hell. Prices are dropping, making HD camcorders an attractive buy relative to their SD competitors, but inexpensive doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Our most recent tally indicates there are no fewer than four possible media types to use, each of which can support multiple encoding formats; the encoding formats, in turn, support various combinations of standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) video formats.Toss in HD’s three different available resolutions, and you have an ugly mess to sort through while you shop. And we haven’t even begun to see the inevitable models based on HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs.

Granted, some of the options currently apply only to the professional shooter. But with ever-improving displays and playback devices, expectations have risen as well, making today’s pro technologies tomorrow’s vacation must-haves.

HD recording formats: 720p or 1080i

Example products	Sony Handycam HDR-FX1 Canon XL H1 Sony Handycam HDR-HC3 Canon XH G1	Sony Handycam HDR-UX1 Sony Handycam HDR-SR1	Panasonic AG-HVX200
Recording format	HDV Note: The HDV format specification supports both 720p and 1080i recording, but camcorders can generally record only one or the other–usually 1080i.	Sony/Panasonic AVCHD	Panasonic DVCPro HD (a.k.a. DVCPro 100)
Supported media types	Tape	Flash, DVD, hard disk	Tape, Flash (Panasonic P2), external hard drive
Format details	MPEG-2 inter- and intraframe compressed to fit on a standard MiniDV tape and use the same bit rate. Max bit rate: 25Mbps Capture resolution: 1,440×1,080/1,280×720 Encoding resolution: 1,920×1,080/1,280×720 Color sampling: 4:2:0 Variable frame rate: no	An HD version of the MPEG-4 Advanced Visual Codec–not to be confused with MPEG HD–which uses the H.264 compression scheme. Max bit rate: 24Mbps Capture resolution: 1,920×1,080/1,280×720 Encoding resolution: 1,920×1,080/1,280×720 Color sampling: 4:2:0 Variable frame rate: yes	MPEG-2 inter- and intraframe compressed to fit on a standard DVCPro tape and stream at the same bit rate. Max bit rate: 100Mbps Capture resolution: 1,920×1,080/1,280×720 Encoding resolution: 1,280×1,080/960×720 Color sampling: 4:2:2 Variable frame rate: yes
Hardware issues	Same limitations as all tape formats: must be converted to files for editing or connected directly to TV.	HD video of DVD-based models are incompatible with older players and will likely have some growing pains with respect to new ones. In theory, they should be compatible with Blu-ray and future players with explicit AVCHD support built in.	None
Video-editing issues	Can be slow and tedious to work with because of time required to download to computer.	Currently, there’s no software support for editing AVCHD video, the operating system requires a device driver to read the DVDs, and special player software is necessary.	As you might imagine, the video files produced can be huge and therefore cumbersome to capture and edit.