Where can I find Information About Camcorders and Webcams?

What is the easiest / best, camcorder to use with my imac running OS X 10.5.1 Leopard...?

• I an a beginner but understand some brands of camcorders transfer video to the mac OS X 10.5 system easily and others do not. Should I get a tape or a disk or a hard drive or a flash drive type of camcorder ? Where can I find good information on this subject ? Thanks in advance for your help..... Bob

• Answer:

  MiniDV tape based camcorders provide the best available video quality and will get along with your Mac just fine. You will need to get a 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable to connect the DV port of the camcorder to the firewire 400 port on the Mac. iMovieHD (or FinalCut) will "Import" the video. Standard definition DV or High Definition HDV work great. I use a SOny HDR-HC1 and HDR-FX1... and I have used Canon and Panasonic miniDV tape based camcorders with my Mac. Most hard drive and flash based camcorders use a very highly compressed MPEG2 video stream for standard definition video. You will connect using USB and copy the video files to the Mac's hard drive. You need to download and install StreamClip so iMovieHD can deal with that format - and translate the file. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/mpegstreamclip.html If you do hidef hard drive of flash memory, you will likely end up with AVCHD encoded/compressed files. Only the most current versions of iMovieHD and FinalCult candeal with this extremely compressed HD video. DVD based camcorders are not worth bothering with and should be recalled by the manufacturers - and anyone who bought one should get their money back. Good information sources: http://forums.cnet.com/5204-7594_102-0.html?forumID=59&tag=forum.fd or http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=141 (search for the model camcorder you think you want, and see what others might have experienced. Before you do anything else, set a budget... Low: around $300 Canon ZR family (ZR800, 900, 930) Mid: around $800 Canon HV20, HV30, Sony HDR-HC7, HC9 High: Around $3000+ Sony HDR-FX1, FX7, Canon XHA1, Panasonic HDX200