I have said for a while that tape based camcorders are a dated technology, however, there is a newer technology that is even worse. DVD camcorders usually are more expensive than DV cameras but, because footage is burnt directly to a DVD which means if you want to edit the footage that you capture then, you are out of luck unless you spend the time to rip the footage off of the disk and then edit from there. However this process is extremly time consuming and costly because you are buying disks that are just used to record and after that they are trash. Although tapes are outdated, they are still very flexible and are still used by major production companies, because of their flexiblity.

The “grand idea” behind DVD camcorders was that you could record a video and then have it right on a disk to play back on a TV without any steps inbetween. However it is just as easy to connect a video cable to your TV and play off your camcorder and then you still have the option to edit it and distribute it over the internet if you want. If I were to go out and buy a camcorder right now, I would reccommend getting a SD memoy card camera because that way you can swap out cards and record as long as you have cards.

In conclusion, DVD camcorders are a dying market and I think that it is useless to get and it causes you to have to buy and use many DVDs. I think in the next few years memory cards and hard drives will be the standard recording media and we can leave this whole DVD and tape mess in the past.