I just bought the HV 10 from Circuit City and a great price ($799) too. But the salesperson told me that the camcorder did indeed have a mic input (which it does not seem to have). I have a need for a camcorder with a mic input and for the life of me I can't find one that uses mini dv tape. Am I missing something here. Any ideas would be greatfull. Thanks, Wynn

Canon HV20, Sony HC7 off the top of my head.

Get the canon HV20 with mic input and headphone output..

Unfortunately, that is typical of many (not all) salespeople @ CircuitCity, BestBuy, and other large retailers. Never fully trust what they say, always verify B4 you buy.

Giving the saleperson the benefit of the doubt, they mistook a mic input for the fact that it has a mic on it that inputs into the video and nothing more than that was covered on the 10 minute training video that they watched. :rolleyes: Based on an alternate motivation to say whatever it took to sell the HV10 to you, they out and out made it up. :mad:

Let the buyer beware is still the best advice! :(

The Sony HDR-SR1 has a mic input, but no headphone jack, and it uses a hard drive rather than tape.

When I first started searching for the HV20, the salesperson (I think at CompUSA) wanted to sell me the HV10 instead (it was marked down). He told me they were practically the same camcorder. And then I told him the form factor on the HV20 is completely different, has HDMI, shoots 24p, and has a mic input. All he replies with is "Oh, I see".

So I ended up just ordering online from Newegg since I don't have to go through annoying salespeople (or pay sales tax). If you can, hopefully you can return the HV10 and get the HV20 instead (if you happened to tape enough with the HV10 to enjoy the picture quality).

Thanks to all for the replies. I love the HV10 and the price I paid is pretty good too. I do need the mic input though and I also need to print to tape (from Final Cut back to the camera) ala Sony and lanc. Unless I can record back to the HV20 with the firewire I may have to go with the Sony.

Wynn

The HV20 does not have lanc.... it also does not have a rear ir receptor for the remote which makes control from the back that much more of a mystery.

The record back to tape issue is completely dependent on the editor that you use and not the cam. I don't know FCP well enough to comment, but i do know that there are other editors out there that will do the job with both cams.

The Sony SR1 lets you send video back to its hard drive.

Note that it does not have a DV out/firewire port, but uses a standard mini-USB cable. This is convenient for using with your computer, but some other components we use in Media Services at my seminary (with bigger cameras) do not have USB inputs: Focus DTE recorder, Sony DVD recorder, etc.

The HV20 has the added benefit of converting analog to digital. You can connect your old camcorder or VCR to the supplied cable and record on miniDV. You can also use the camcorder to pass thru the analog to a recorder like a computer without recording on tape. This is the same as my older Canon Elura. I have done this a few times.

I record a show every year that I then create a DVD for cast & crew. The first year I left video recording for digital, I bought a DVD Recorder. After making a DVD for each show (2) over all the nights I record (6) I discovered that it is not easy to edit in Mpeg2 (at least at that time). What I did was play the DVD out of the analog jacks of the recorder (was firewire in only)thru the camcorder to my computer. Quality was pretty good. The next year I bought a Pioneer DVR with hard drive and Firewire in/out (very rare) and transfer right off the hard drive to my computer.