Just before Hanna was born I was talking about camcorders, so here’s a little of what I learned and what I think I’m going to do. Remember I wanted either a flash drive or hard disk drive camcorder, I wanted it to hook right up to my Mac and work with iMovie, and I wanted it to be highly portable. The highly portable part for me meant I wanted something small and somewhat durable. I went back and forth on what to do and found what I wanted for about $400 but I thought, what the heck, I’ll try to go cheap first.
For around $100 I picked up a Aiptek from Circuit City, since that was the closest store to the hospital. I knew this would not be grand, but was surprised that the video quality was not too shabby for what it was. 2 things I did not expect though - it didn’t work with my Mac (without getting other programs to convert this to that) and it used AA batteries as opposed to having an internal rechargeable. It was also very awkward to hold in my hand and actually use at the same time. I returned it the next day.
I haven’t bought another one yet but I know what I’m getting whenever I do buy. I went back to the line that I found that really appealed to me in the first place, and it was from Panasonic. Several of those are nice and compact but 2 of them really stood out to me. The cheapest one at $250 is the SDR-S10P1 and it is impact and water resistant. Then slightly more expensive at $400 is the SDR-SW20S (also in red) and it’s impact resistant and waterproof to about 5 feet deep. I know that’s not too deep, but it’s still a pretty cool feature.
I want the one that’s waterproof for several reasons. One is that it’s also dust/sand proof, which would be great for us here at the beach. When we were scalloping this summer, I was out there thinking how cool it would be to have a waterproof camera, and the 5′ depth limit wouldn’t be a problem out there. We vacation at the lake each year, and my kids also enjoy playing in the rain. Then last Sunday our neighbor had a birthday party with a big water slide. That would have been so fun to have that thing in the pool at the bottom as my kids came flying down!
I discovered that all of those shown on that page record in mpeg 4, which is what will work with iMovie. I read one review where the lady said she hooked it up and iMovie picked it up right away without having to load additional software, and that’s important to me. I read as many reviews as I could find on them and got lots of mixed opinions. Some said it was poor quality and were recommending very expensive HD cameras instead. I learned a while ago that reviewers like that are generally professional reviewers who have access to lots of different products, so of course they lean towards the best of the best. Other reviews were from regular people like me and they loved the video quality and performance, and I think I fall into that “regular people” category. You can’t shoot in very low light, but I never do anyway so it’s not an issue for me. There are a few clips on Youtube, but of course since the site compresses everything so much nothing looks great there. I think it’ll probably be perfect for what I need.
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