12-28-2009, 06:50 PM

Been shopping for a new HD camcorder and see some with as much as 250 gig harddrive and what do they do for an output USB 2.0!! My 5 year old mini DV handycam at least has a 1394. Yeah, yeah I know USB 2 and Firewire 400 are suppose to be about the same but the tests consistently show firewire 400 is about 20% faster.

Firewire 800 would be out of this world and since I just got a new Mac Book with the 800 plug it only makes sense to find a camcorder.

Anyone know of a decent unit in the $1,000 range with one?

Thanks for replying.

12-29-2009, 01:38 AM

Consumer HD camcorders come in 2 flavors - HDV (more rare) that will use firewire to transfer the video, but only FW400 - which is all that's needed for its design - and mass storage (hdd, sd, etc.) which uses (only AFAIK) USB as it makes the camera look like a mounted drive. If there are any fw800 camcorders, they'd be high end pro-sumer, or professional grade, ie:lots of cash.

I wouldn't be too upset about the USB based mass storage camcorders, they work well and overall, the transfer rate isn't terrible. Could it be better? sure. Is it worth fretting over - probably not at this stage with the budget you have in mind. Plus, you don't specify the Mac you have, but depending on your configuration, you may find more of a bottleneck in the system converting the HD footage to AIC (iMovie, FCE) or ProRES (FCP) rather then the transfer of the footage off of an SD card via USB.