Need to get video camera fast

[Solberg]

I just took out my 4 year old mini dv cannon vidoe camera and found that it is bloody dead.

Anyway, it's time for an upgrade. I need the camera by next Wednesday so not much time for research.

I was looking at the Toshiba Camileo H20 and the Toshiba Camileo S10 both of which are dirt cheap shoot full HD and are nice and small.

I am using it to mount in my car for a road trip I'm going on next week.

And after that I would like to take it with me to places so compact = good. But I won't give up too much video quality for compactness.

The things I need are:

Good FPS
Good Battery life
Good quality
Compact if possible

What models should I look at/get?

 

[Solberg]

I just took out my 4 year old mini dv cannon video camera and found that it is bloody dead.

Anyway, it's time for an upgrade. I need the camera by next Wednesday so not much time for research.

I was looking at the Toshiba Camileo H20 and the Toshiba Camileo S10 both of which are dirt cheap shoot full HD and are nice and small.

I am using it to mount in my car for a road trip I'm going on next week.

And after that I would like to take it with me to places so compact = good. But I won't give up too much video quality for compactness.

The things I need are:

Good FPS
Good Battery life
Good quality
Compact if possible

What models should I look at/get?

 

[Dr_Grip]

What's your budget limit?

 

[Matt2000]

The H20 looks similar to another I'm looking at, but doesn't have any optical zoom. The one I'm looking at is the DXG DVH596 from Maplin, and is slightly more expensive.

 

[swraman]

I have a sony hdr-hc5, its a HDV camera (and it uses regular DV tapes, so you can still use those expensive tapes

The picture quality is great as long as the lighting is OK, there is considerable loss if it is dark. But most consumer cameras are like that.

Its pretty much everything my old DV camera was (it was a panasonic miniDV camcorder), but it does everything better and in HD.

Ive had it for a couple years, got it for 1K. records in 1080i or 480i, videos it records look good as 720p (you have to reencode it to gat it to anything progressive though). I reencode to x264 720p and burn to an avcHD DVD-R and it plays fine in my bluray player.