Tapeless, diskless, driveless video camera - HF11

I finally took the plunge and upgraded my video camera. I decided I wanted to have something that did not need tapes or DVDs for recording. This left the choice between a hard drive or solid state memory. After a lot of research, e.g. camcorderinfo.com and CNET, I decided not to go with a hard drive camera. Primary reasons were drive reliability and battery usage.

Again the web reviews were useful in helping me narrow down my choice. My choice was made a little easier when I discovered that Canon had introduced an HD camera with 32GB of onboard memory, the HF11. Of course I could get more memory with a hard drive, up to 120GB, and other solid state cameras use memory cards. But having onboard memory is more reliable, and the camera that I chose has an SD slot for expanding the memory with SDHC cards. This amount of memory equates to almost 3 hours of recording at the highest quality. This is more than enough for week to week recording, as I can transfer the files to my computer on a regular basis. When we go on our round the world trip, sometime in the next 12 months, I can buy some extra memory cards, or use hotel computers to transfer the files home.

The camera arrived last week, and I had a great weekend playing around with it. An important part of my testing was with the editing of the digital files. The HF11 stores files in the AVCHD format, and I had read that this format uses a lot of computer cycles when processed for editing. Luckily, my editing environment, quad-core CPU with Sony Vegas software seems to be able to handle the AVCHD files almost as easily as the files captured from tape. One big advantage of the non-tape based recording is that file copying is much faster than the real-time capture that I had to do with tape.

I was totally blown away by the size of the camera, compared to my previous first generation HD tape based Sony HDR-HC1, it is about 50% smaller in all directions making it about one quarter in volume! It is literally a palm sized camera. That gives it a link to the travel side of this blog, because the camera is small enough to slip into a brief case, even a (largish) coat pocket. [Just remember to take it out when you go through security at the airport]

Once I have more experience with the camera, I will post some more information.