DV cam capture to PC help & advice on vid capture card needed

[ShinGouki]

Ok im bascially wanting to record to my PC from a camcorder and can't decide on what to get.

The two main options i see are the expensive DV cams that come with firewire for streaming to the hard drive.

The cheaper option seems to be to go with a a hi 8 camera, that uses a tape but is very high quality obviously not digital though. in this scenario i would obviously need a video capture card.

I guess my question is, with a DV cam coming in around $200 -- $250 more than the hi 8 cam. Is it worth it, or is the quality im likely to get from a reasonable quality vid capture card comparable anyway.....

If so i allready have a decent graphics card and don't really want to replace that as such, are there any good affordable TV capture cards for what im wanting that don't use the graphics card.... any advice you can give will be much appreciated and general opinions are welcome too.

Most of the shots are likely to be indoor shots if that makes a difference

 

[oldfart]

I've done both and I can say DV capture is SO MUCH BETTER. Much easier, way smaller file size (13 Gig for 1 Hr of full quality 720 x 480 DV video). All you need is a firewire port on the PC. With analog, you need video and audio, which can cause sync problems, you have very large capture files, and need to do some sort of a low level compression during capture. Yuck. I could never go back to that!

 

[ShinGouki]

Thanks this is exactly the kind of comments i need,

So with DV cam what should i be looking for?

Im pretty new to DV cams and haven't had any experience with them are there any pitfalls you can help me avoid when picking one. The cheaper the better to be honest

I found this camera is this kind of thing any good for what i want.....

Samsung DV cam

its still more pricy than i was really hoping to pay but i can understand why with what you just said....
any cheaper alternatives you could reccommend?

 

[oldfart]

If you plan on capturing video to your PC for authoring (S)VCD or DVD disks, the DV camera is well worth it. That model looks fine. I got my DV cam about a year ago. I went with the Canon ZR40.

 

[ShinGouki]

Thanks you've been very helpful