It's been a lousy summer so far here in Blighty. Even in Scotland, a country not known for it's balmy evenings, it's mostly been cold, dull and grey. My weather widget seldom brings cheer. Not much by way of opportunity to whip out my new camcorder. Oh yes.
The old one, a Canon of a scant 4 years of age, has a broken imaging sensor - a fault recognised by Canon and fixed free of charge if I can get my lazy arse around to packing it up and shipping the thing off for repair.
So anyway, rather than do that I went, in true gadgeteer style, and got meself a high def unit from Sony. Rather than go nuts and get a hard drive or DVD or even solid state model, this one records onto tape. A wee bit retro, don'tcha think? But for good reason, dear reader. Tape, simply because iMovie HD won't talk anything else. And it's a good archive medium. Although with iLife 08 waiting in the wings at Apple HQ, I wouldn't be surprised if the latest version supported AVHCD, the new-fangled format supported by most non-tape camcorders.
And with HD video chewing through 1 gig of drive space per minute of footage, I can't afford to have anything significant hanging around on the iMac. Once edited down, that holiday footage can be punted back onto tape for archiving and later embarrassment of my daughter when she's 18 (currently 10 months).
I'll post a review of the fancy-schmancy 'corder soon. It's a HDR-HC5 btw, you Sony model number spotting freaks.
