I've been contemplating buying a new camcorder and the tapeless one's have the advantage of not having to swap tapes after my 60 minute. However, I loath the prospect of having to edit in MPEG-2.

At present, I think my options are to buy a DV-tape camcorder, and strap on a firewire drive rig (expensive, but doable, not very handy though)

Are there any options in the works from camcorder companies? Surely they must realize that even joe-idiot consumer doesn't just use his recordings with no editing whatsoever.

I've been contemplating buying a new camcorder and the tapeless one's have the advantage of not having to swap tapes after my 60 minute. However, I loath the prospect of having to edit in MPEG-2.

If you think editing in MPEG2 is stupid, try editing in MPEG4!:p

But seriously, ridiculously broken-by-design shooting "formats" aside, I think what you're missing about DV is that sadly the format is pretty much tied to tape mechanisms in the industry. Therefore, the products out there that allow you to shoot DV to a random access device (like a hard drive) are niche, and fairly costly as they are not simple "firewire drives" but actually little bits of technology that mimic a fake tape device and push and pull data through a EIDE or SATA bridge to a storage device.

As far as actual HDD cameras that shoot DV, I'm not sure any exist. However there do exist hard drive units that interface with various kinds of DV cameras in various ways at various prices (all painfully high).