The extended warranty company wants to replace my 6 year old Sony DCR-PC110 rather than repair an audio static problem. I thought they would offer me a SD camcorder, but they are offering either the Sony HDR-HC5 or Canon HV20. Lucky me. At first, I was leaning towards the Sony until I realized my batteries/memory sticks are not compatible.

From what I've read here the Canon HV20 is considered the better of the two overall. I am mostly an auto/easy mode person who just follows the kids around filming. Low light performance is important and I have used nightshot before to at least capture what's going on, but I am looking forward to recording in 24p cinema mode to at least add color to my low light recording. So I am very much leaning towards the HV20.

I do have a couple of questions for those more experienced with these models or others:

1. I used a wide angle conversion lens with my old Sony that is 37mm filter size. I should be able to use this lens with the HV20 by getting a step down ring to go from 43mm lens to 37mm filter (B&H has one). Would you recommend this? I never noticed any stretching effects of using the lens on my Sony, but I am not sure about the step down increasing potential for image issues. I enjoy that the wide angle let's me get close to the action and handle my kids while shooting, and since the HV20 min focal length is 6.1, I am worried about taking a few more steps back. I would like to avoid putting up the $$$ for the Canon 43 mm wide angle conversion lens. Any thoughts?

2. My old Sony allowed recording a short, low quality mpeg to the memory stick eithe live or during playback from tape. This was a convenient feature for downloading from stick and quickly emailing out clips. From what I can tell neither the HV 20 or current Sony models support this feature. Am I missing this? Why did this feature go away? Am I the only one who misses it?

3. Since the extended warranty company is being good to me, I am seriously considering getting another warranty for the new one. Is there a recommendation for an good reputable after purchase extended warranty? From what I recall 6 years ago, the Sony models had a great quality reputation and Canon's reputation was alright. I know these models have only been out a couple of months, but is quality an issue now for either brand?

4. The audio pickup from the top mounted mic on my old Sony was disappointing. My voice would dominate the audio and subjects 7 to 10 feet away sounded too distant. My Sony old gun/zoom mic (another obsolete accessory) solved that for me. Will I have the same problems with the HV20?

On another note, the repair issues with my PC110 have made me seriously consider archiving the 40 plus DV tapes of family moments. I plan to dub the videos to my ReplayTV and then extract the mpeg using DV archive to hard drive storage. From what I can tell, this should yield comparable results to pulling video to my computer and then compressing for storage efficiency, but take less time. I don't have a DVD recorder (yet) but this would probably yield the same results if I authored a DVD with the DV Archive extracted image. Has anyone tried this?

Thanks for helping the noob.

I am moving my last question to the ReplayTV forum. Anyone have thoughts on the other questions?

In case anyone is interested here (perhaps not), here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=10831907&&#post10831907) is the response to the ReplayTV questions from the other forum, thanks to MrPlastic:

You'll maintain the best picture quality by transferring to the PC via Firewire, then archiving as an AVI file. Going to MPEG-2 (DVD) will result in loss of chroma (color) information (DV uses 4:1:1 subsampling, while MPEG-2 uses 4:2:0--the net result will be equivalent to 4:1:0; see Wikipedia's article on chroma subsampling for more information). Conversion to MPEG-2 also makes editing more difficult, as it is primarily a delivery format. That being said, I've edited DV on a PC and output to DVD, and the results can look really great.

Going through the ReplayTV will have the above drawbacks, since it uses MPEG-2 compression, but you will also incur loss of luma resolution through the additional D/A and A/D steps involved and possibly through selection of recording quality.

If you're sure you want to convert to MPEG-2, then do the conversion on the computer: you can use free tools to perform multi-pass conversions that will give higher quality at lower bitrates than anything you will get out of the ReplayTV. It *will* take longer--for a full tape, plan on letting the conversion run overnight--but you'll maintain the best quality possible and end up with smaller files, to boot.

Best of luck.

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If anyone has time, I would appreciate any advice on questions 1-4 above.