Rugged Mini-DV Camcorder for the Road?

step asks: "As part of my job, I (and my colleagues) spend weeks at a time on the road, doing science shows for high school students. To review our work, we carry DV camcorders to tape and watch our performances. Unfortunately, all the previous models we've tried haven't lasted more than 12 months on the road (and not from lack of care). When returned for repair we were told that they weren't faulty, just not up to the task. We don't need a full feature camera, just solid reliable recording and playback. In fact, simple is probably better to accommodate the most users. What experience has Slashdot had with camcorders? What's a good model that can handle lots of travel?"

Comments

Inexpensive redundancy.

[OgGreeb]

Given the reasonable price of Mini-DV camcorders, you'd be better off purchasing two or three identical units and rotate their use. If something fails you can pull out the backup. You might also find it useful to record your work from different positions and edit them together.

Since you asked, I've had good experience with a hand-sized Sony DCR-PC9 -- it's been beat up but remains completely functional and reliable.

Cheap, Cheap, Cheap

[pagercam2]

Don't spend large amounts of money, get the cheapest one you can find with reasonable features and quality and just allow for the fact that it needs to get replaced every so often. I'd much rather have to buy 10 $200 recorders instead of one $2000 which might get stolen misplaced or break in a fall. Get an expensive pair of sunglasses and you'll lose them in a week, get a cheap pair and you can't throw them away!!!

Re:Hard-drive based camcorder?

[TheRaven64]

No, DV footage is compressed, basically MJPEG. What DV does not do is interframe compression. This is not to reduce CPU usage, which is a minor problem (after all, MPEG-1/2/4 hardware encoder chips are relatively cheap). This is done because it is a bitch to edit interframe compressed footage. If you want to cut somewhere other than a keyframe, you need to at the very least add a pair of keyframes, which causes a bandwidth spike in the result. Then, when you encode to something else for deployment you have to insert keyframes in different places, and you end up with a huge drop in quality.

Oh, and MPEG-1/2 also has some additional design constraints that were removed for MPEG-4, such as the requirement to be able to easily skip one frame backwards (MPEG-4 was designed for streaming, MPEG-1/2 were designed for local playback), so MPEG-4 doesn't encode reverse-interframe information. If you want to jump one frame backwards in MPEG-4, you jump back to the previous keyframe (often 100 or so frames back), and then calculate the deltas for every single intermediate frame. Try editing that...

As to the link you posted, I am very suspicious of a chart which groups Sorenson, MPEG-4 and Cinepak in the same column...