Hey chaps. My wife is going to Florida for three and a half weeks on a business trip. I would like to send a small camcorder with her for impromptu video grabs or whatever. Now lets not make any mistakes here. She is not a tech geek. This thing needs a bit of an automatic transmission so to speak. She is actually very intuitive and can figure out menus and settings fairly easily but editing and transferring to the pc should be dead solid easy. In fact, the editing is superfluous. She won't do it. PC transfer needs to be bang on simple.
I don't want to spend more than two hundred dollars for this device. A; it is on a plane, in luggage, motel room = possible loss or theft. B; a standard def cam is fine for catch it as you can shooting. I want it to be easy and natural. Not a lot of complicated hoopla just to shoot a scene at the beach or a park.
So this leaves us with the little flash camcorders such the JVC Everio, Panasonics, and the Samsungs. Possibly a Canon. They all run around 150-200 dollars at BestBuy on sale. They all use SDHC cards. So give me your take on battery life, ease of use, and using them as a webcam. Her latptop did not come with one and most of the cheaper web cams are junk to put it bluntly. What I really do not want to deal with is the little "HD" flash cams like Insignia, Flip, or some of the others that record in AVCHD formats. They are impossible to edit in things like Microsoft Movie Maker. My daughter has an Insignia model from a few years ago and it is nearly impossible to edit the movies she makes. This seems to be true across the scope of these pocket camcorders. Well, unless you want to buy a multiple hundreds of dollars software app. No thanks. Not right now. Not for a point and shoot type camcorder. So I suppose file format is important as well. I don't know video container and file formats very well. Just give me your straight take on things. I am not brand specific other than it must use SD cards. No memory sticks or other formats that require me to buy new cards. Thanks.
Regards, Todd
I don't want to spend more than two hundred dollars for this device. A; it is on a plane, in luggage, motel room = possible loss or theft. B; a standard def cam is fine for catch it as you can shooting. I want it to be easy and natural. Not a lot of complicated hoopla just to shoot a scene at the beach or a park.
So this leaves us with the little flash camcorders such the JVC Everio, Panasonics, and the Samsungs. Possibly a Canon. They all run around 150-200 dollars at BestBuy on sale. They all use SDHC cards. So give me your take on battery life, ease of use, and using them as a webcam. Her latptop did not come with one and most of the cheaper web cams are junk to put it bluntly. What I really do not want to deal with is the little "HD" flash cams like Insignia, Flip, or some of the others that record in AVCHD formats. They are impossible to edit in things like Microsoft Movie Maker. My daughter has an Insignia model from a few years ago and it is nearly impossible to edit the movies she makes. This seems to be true across the scope of these pocket camcorders. Well, unless you want to buy a multiple hundreds of dollars software app. No thanks. Not right now. Not for a point and shoot type camcorder. So I suppose file format is important as well. I don't know video container and file formats very well. Just give me your straight take on things. I am not brand specific other than it must use SD cards. No memory sticks or other formats that require me to buy new cards. Thanks.
Regards, Todd
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