Posted by slugbug on 11/02/06 20:55

About 3 years ago, my mother in law gave us a Canon Hi-8 camcorder
that she rarely used. With it, I was able to capture lots of videos of
my son (now 3) and daughter (now 2). Unfortunately, it apears that
several pixels in the middle of the optical sensor have gone bad,
because now every recording I make has an area that is missing any sort
of signal. It is a Canon ES2000.

For some time, I've thought about upgrading to a new camcorder, but
price kept me from it. We simply never had $500 or more saved up.
Right now I do have $300, so I was thinking of looking around for
anything that might work well for $300 or less. Here is where I was
looking:

http://www.pricewatch.com/1/220/1777-1.htm

I would appreciate it greatly if any of you could give me feedback on
which of these I might want to avoid like the plague, and which might
be best. I will primarily be using the camcorder initially to convert
old 8mm films (home movies from the 1950's through around 1980) over
onto my PC, and of course to record new home videos of my kids.

There are 3 things that I want:

1) ability to add a 3rd party battery cheaply (at least 5 amp hours, so
I can record several hours worth of video per battery)

2) good quality capture, hopefully better than what my old Hi-8
camcorder would have done

3) firewire support - to make it easy to transfer things to my PC

Any hints or advice you might be able to give will be appreciated
greatly. Otherwise, I might end up going with the cheapest model in
the list.

[Back to original message]