Re: …Buying a Camcorder…
I have a DVD camcorder , absolutely love it. I use rewritable DVD’s though for recording purposes and then I transfer the video on the full size DVD’s.
The only concern I have , for HD camcorder, is that , if for any reason a HD is dropped or given a jerk as simple as dropping it from your work desk to carpet it gets ruined and is hard to recover .You end up buying a new one. I have ruined more than a couple of HD’s that way. If the video is recorded on a DVD then it is safe from this kind of loss.
Now there is another alternative to DVD recorder , Hitachi has come up with Blue Ray recorder they have two models read the introduction here:
http://av.hitachi.com/camcorder/blu-ray/index.html
It has one hour recoding capacity , that is more than enough for an enthusiast.