How are the New Consumer Flash and Hard Drive Based HD cams?

[Jackson Miller]

I am looking into a cheaper secondary HD cam for filming things on the go and for filming parkour. I am trying to stay away from tapes though I have seen HV20 images that are beautiful. So, how are the HG20 and the HF10? Those are the ones I have narrowed it down to. Both are around $650 from B&H. What is the difference? I mean the HG20 is hard drive based and the HF10 is flash based but what does that really mean? As I understand the HF10 has built in flash memory (kinda like a Hard drive right?) and the HG20 has a slot for a flash card to add on to its 60 gig hard drive. So what is really the difference? The HG20 seems the best choice for me. it is about 30 bucks cheaper and has 24mps while the other one is 17 or 19.

Any problems in general I should know before I buy a HG20? The image quality is good right?

 

[dpFilms]

Entity, I don't own either of these cameras myself but have been doing a lot of research on the Canon Vixia family and am leaning towards the HF100. It's identical to the HF10 but has no internal flash memory.

From my perspective:

1) 24mps (HG20) vs. 17mps (HF10) is not important to me. I know this statement is likely to start some controversy but I personally feel playing the numbers game has gone overboard. Manufacturers have to keep raising the bar to sell more cameras and the average consumer--and there are lots of them--chase the numbers like lemmings. "24 has to be better than 17 because it's higher. Right?" Realistically, most of us produce films to be viewed/distributed on the web at 1280x720 using some form of compression. I haven't run a frame by frame comparison of 24mps vs. 17mps AVCHD but I'm inclined to believe the difference between them would be immaterial when distributed as described. Especially when viewed by the "average" viewer.

2) I don't want a camera with a hard drive. I take good care of my gear but a spinning hard disk is one more moving part that both a) introduces a mechanical point of failure and b) sucks up battery power. Also, I don't like the idea of having to tether the camera to the computer to transfer files. Being able to remove an SD card and flip it into a card reader is a big win for me.

3) At B&H, there's a $100 price difference between the HF10 and the HF100. Put this $100 towards 2 x Class 4, 16GB SD cards (i.e 2 x $65 @ B&H), get a $70 rebate from SanDisk and still be up $40 over the purchase price of the HF10.

If none of these reasons sways you, the HG20 is still a fine camera and I'm sure you'd be happy with it.

 

[gowhitesox99]

I want to get a canon HD camera and am also thinking of getting one with removable memory also for that reason, might make it a tad lighter too