MiniDV Trouble

I recently went to Best Buy to buy a Firewire cable and a MiniDV head cleaning kit to try and revive my old camcorder and transfer some old skateboarding footage onto my laptop. After purchasing the items and returning home I tried to use the head cleaner but it failed and proved to me that my 7-year-old camcorder was now obsolete.

I began to search the Internet to see if I could buy a tape deck specifically for transferring video from MiniDV tapes to a computer but had no luck. I realized that I was going to have to buy a new camcorder. I searched Amazon.com to see if I could find some good deals on cameras. I came across the Sony DCR-VX2100, Panasonic Pro AG-DVC30, and Canon GL2. For years I have wanted to own one of these models but they’ve always been a bit out of my price range. After drooling for a bit, I continued on down the list to the cheaper cameras.

While I was browsing through the camcorders I noticed that many of the affordable consumer cameras could film in high definition. Some save the video onto a hard drive, eliminating the need to deal with tapes. Others still use a MiniDV tape but they are a higher resolution HD MiniDV tape. This surprised me because now the HD revolution has reached not only films, but now home video as well. Since I was not too interested in filming in HD and was just looking for a good 3CCD MiniDV camcorder, I continued my search but found nothing worth spending the money on. I decided to save up and put the money I would have spent towards one of the cameras I listed above.

Sometimes the advancement of technology is exciting to me and sometimes it just makes me frustrated. Now if I want to produce professional quality video, sooner or later I will most likely have to move into the realm of High Definition. Leaving me questioning whether or not it is even worth investing in one of the listed cameras. Everything is moving towards becoming completely digital. It might not be long until MiniDV tapes are obsolete.