Question for a laymen; in light of the Blue Ray/ HD-DVD war, If I buy a Sony HDR-SR7, it there a chance that I will not be able to play the Hi-Def DVD’s in say 10 years??? I’m new to all this formatting and am planning to buy a camcorder very soon. I still have a ton of Beta home movies and don't want to end up in the same boat.

No.

I assume you transfered all those beta recordings to DVD. If not...why not?

My 8mm films from the 1950's have been on DVD's for almost a decade.

So can I assume that no means that it will play on both blue ray and HD-DVD players?
Also, Star56, the Beta videos are from my fathers collection of when we were kids. I have been planning to hook it up and transfer to VHS, but how can transfer them to DVD? Do i have it professionaly done. I would like to be able to edit them since there are about 10 hours of my father chasing the dog when he forgot to hit the button to stop the recording.

The recording format of the camcorder has nothing to do with the authoring format of either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. You can shoot video on your camcorder and output in as many shiny disk or file based formats as you like.

Thank you very much. I had a feeling that was the case or no one ould be buying Hi-Def camcorders.

not trying to be funny. but never expect anything to last 10yrs in this market..

Question for a laymen; in light of the Blue Ray/ HD-DVD war, If I buy a Sony HDR-SR7, it there a chance that I will not be able to play the Hi-Def DVD’s in say 10 years??? I’m new to all this formatting and am planning to buy a camcorder very soon. I still have a ton of Beta home movies and don't want to end up in the same boat.
No, format war does not really affect your camcorder choice. HD camcorder uses either mpeg2 or AVC for compressing video, both MPEG2 and AVC are supported by both HD DVD and BR. With proper authoring tools, you can burn your video to either format without losing resolution. Though as of now there are not many uthoring tools, it will change.

Most importantly, you can simply transfer video to a PC and then you can convert to whatever format you like and don't worry about burning to a disc.

Question for a laymen; in light of the Blue Ray/ HD-DVD war, If I buy a Sony HDR-SR7, it there a chance that I will not be able to play the Hi-Def DVD’s in say 10 years??? I’m new to all this formatting and am planning to buy a camcorder very soon. I still have a ton of Beta home movies and don't want to end up in the same boat.

The war is over, Blu Ray lost!

You can already burn HD DVD compatible disk on standard DVD media in HD using Pinnacle Studio or Ulead products. I'm doing that with a Sony HC7.

So that's a Sony (who supports Blu-Ray) capturing HD for creation of an HD DVD.

As other posted, the video capture is unrelated to the video authoring.