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Hard Disk Camcorder: Panasonic SDR-H18


$500

Reasonable Reader Bethany requested a recommendation for a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) camcorder:

I’m looking for a hard-disk handheld video camera for my husband’s birthday. I want one that we can download the movies onto our computer and edit them. I want it to have lots of hours of available memory. I want it to be small.

We record family events, wrestling meets, basketball games, and football games. We have a camcorder that is about 7 years old with tapes. It’s okay, but tapes are harder to find, get messed up, and until we figure out how to get them on DVD, we can only watch them when we plug the camera into the tv. Our camera does have an incredible zoom so that helps a lot when we’re on the sidelines and can’t see our player clearly with the naked eye. We have a normal home computer that I imagine downloading the videos onto to burn DVDs. We would probably want to delete zoomed in shots of baldspots and anything else our boys think hilarious to record. We are not professionals.

HDD camcorders are definitely awesome, the way to go if you don’t want to deal with tapes (most of the midrange and budget camcorders are miniDV; the Reasonable Camcorder might be too). The reasonable HDD camcorder seems to be the Panasonic SDR-H18, as suggested by Consumer Search with a reasonable review by CNet.

The SDR-H18 has enough storage for 7 hours of footage, and the battery life is excellent (though you’ll need at least one extra battery to fill up the hard drive). Editing may be difficult with the camera itself, but with a computer, transfer and editing should be much simpler than with any other format. It has 32x optical zoom, which is good for this price range.

You can order it straight from Panasonic for $500; I have no idea why Amazon charges $700, but a $200 markup is pretty unreasonable in my opinion. That’s still a little higher than what Bethany wanted to spend, but there are so many options out there (and it really is ridiculous) in this case I’d say a little extra money will go a long way towards minimizing the risk of getting something that’s really unusable.

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