Sony handycam on my xmas wishlist...any suggestions?

Question

my wife and i want to buy a sony handycam (or other brand....if good recommendations) for Christmas..
....can anyone put there two cents in?...
.....what problems do u have with yours overall, and with working with your mac?
....we mainly want it for typical recording of family memories such as kid's activities (daughter's figure skating, son's baseball games, swimming in the pool and so on)....
... i have been told that the --in thing--right now is the camcorder with the Hardrive .....no disc, no tapes, ....what is your take on this format?... i do like the idea of a hybrid (made by other brands...whereby the cam has a hard drive and a direct-to-dvd disc recording option....)

Answer 1

Ditto to everything mishmumken's said, and also in that Discussions thread he mentions (..I think mishmumken's a 'he'..)
Some newer camcorders can record 'HDV' ..that's high definition video, to match the new HD TVs. But they need a very fast Mac and lots of RAM (memory) in order to handle the hi-def material (..you don't say which Mac you have..) so unless you have one of the very latest Macs, or a tower PowerMac or MacPro, it may not be worth getting an HDV model. (..The HDV cams also use miniDV tape, which is what you should be looking for..)
You can't go wrong with a Sony, Panasonic ..or Canon (though Canons won't let you plug in an external FireWire hard disc into your Mac at the same time as connecting a Canon camcorder).
Your movies will look better if the camcorder has a built-in 'image stabiliser', to avoid camera shake.
As mish says, a wide-angle screw-on adaptor is an excellent idea if you intend to shoot indoors as well as outdoors. Most cams have a good zoom, for getting close to sports action outdoors, but don't 'pull back' very wide, so few will shoot a family group in a room indoors unless you add a wide-angle lens on the front.
Just in case you're going to get a bit more serious in 6 months or a year's time, it might be worth looking for a cam which has an 'external microphone' socket on it somewhere ..so that you'd be able, later if you want, to get a 'zoom' or 'gun' mic to fit on the camera, and thus get "close up sounds" of those sports and swimming shots along with the "close up" video which the camera's zoom lens gives you.
You'll need to buy a 4-pin-to-6-pin DV/i.Link/FireWire cable to go with the camcorder, as there's never one in the box with the cam. The cable connects the FireWire, also known as DV, socket on the camera (..called "i.Link" if it's a Sony cam..) to your Mac.
Do NOT buy any camcorder which has only a USB socket: that will NOT work with iMovie. Just about every miniDV or Digital-8 (..same thing but cheaper..) camcorder has a DV socket, but the hard-disc, DVD or memory-chip camcorders do NOT have a DV socket (..they have only USB..) and they're not directly compatible with iMovie, without passing the video through other software in order to convert it to DV format.
In 5 words; get a Sony miniDV camcorder.