I need to compare price of camcorder in Japan

Any guy from Japan or nice links?

[tomda]

I would like to purchase some "Hard Drive Camcorders" from Japan (friend of mine is going there soon).

I have seen today that hard Drive corders are the camcorder of the future. You do not need tapes or discs, everything is in the hard drive (20 to 30 Gb). Plug and play directly at you TV, CPU - no need of transfering or encoding datas.

JVC was the first one to launch Hard Drive cams with the Everio G Series (GZ-MV). The advantage of the JVC camcorder is that it can be plug directly (without computer) to a DVD-Burner!

Sony is going to launch its first one soon in Japan and US (in March - about 1100USD). It seems it will much better in quality but it doesn't have yet a DVD-Burner attached to it.

<You can find Japanese Electronics sites written in English via a Google search>

[edited by: lawman at 1:42 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2006]

[lawman]

What is the original format (e.g. .avi)?

[tomda]

It's MPEG-2 for both Sony and JVC.

About japanese electronics website in English, I really have difficulties to find such site in Google :(
I guess I'll do more search...

[lawman]

Very difficult to edit in MPEG-2 format. Most Nonlinear editors require .avi format.

[tomda]

Hi Lawman,

Very difficult to edit in MPEG-2 format

What do you mean exactly by that?

[lawman]

If all you want to do is shoot a movie and have it on a dvd, there are camcorders out there that will do this already - no need to add the extra step of saving it to the camcorder's internal storage first. Just keep in mind that mpeg format is a compressed format and not conducive to editing.

However, if you want to edit your videos (take out unnecessary footage, add transitions, etc.) you want it stored in a format that is easily editable.

A camcorder with a 20-30GB harddrive certainly has enough capacity to store your movies in the .avi format, which is uncompressed and can result in large files but is easily editable.

[lawman]

These links should help you understand:

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[deskshare.com...]

[tomda]

Thanks Lawman,

I guess from your remark that a DVD camcorder is more than enough... You are may be right but the idea of no additional cost, such as DVD, is interesting...

Regarding the MPEG-2, it seems that HD camcorders have a codec chip integrated so that it can "encodes and decodes the data"... It is still a bit vague, I'll some more search on this topic.

Thank you for your remarks ;)

[tomda]

I see what you mean now!
As you say, I do not understand why they have a 30 Gb Hard Drive and decided to use a poor codec?

[Crush]

Be careful of warranty. I was in Japan last November and the electrical stuff often has a 1 year Japanese valid warranty only.

[bill]

A lot of the big electronics stores have international models available that have different warranties available and English documentation. Some stores even sell international versions of products duty-free. You have to present your passport and departure date info to get these deals though.

The down side to getting English documentation is that often you can't get the very latest products. If you're OK with an all Japanese product then you can get some of the fun new stuff.

A lot of Japanese electronics makers use the Japan domestic market as a test-bed for their products. If they do well here then they work on the international models.