Q I want to buy a high-def camcorder and like the idea of memory-card or hard-drive convenience, but it seems you always recommend that people stick with tape. Is this still what you recommend, and why?
MIKE MANNAS, PITTSBURGH
A Until recently, memory-based AVCHD camcorders could not match the image quality of tape-based HDV camcorders, which kept me from recommending them. That's no longer the case with two great new Canon models, but you still must tread carefully if choosing AVCHD.
Canon's HF10 and HF100 AVCHD camcorders record on SDHC cards, fitting approximately 30 minutes of high-definition footage on a 4-gigabyte card. They are identical except for the HF10's black finish and 16GB of internal memory. I recommend using 4GB cards because you can burn the contents of an entire card on a DVD, which makes archiving easy.
I tested the HF10 recently and was wowed by it. It's lightweight yet solid, has long battery life and uses optical image stabilization for steady images. There's no intruding tape motor noise, and reviewing and deleting clips was a snap. A drawback is that it has no viewfinder, so you must compose images solely with the LCD screen.
Compared with my Canon HV20, an HDV camcorder considered to be the best high-definition consumer camcorder available last year, I was surprised to find that in almost every instance I preferred the HF10's video. It looked sharper, cleaner and more colorful.
The HF10 typically sells for $839. You can buy the HF100 online for $639, which is inexpensive for any high-definition camcorder, let alone one that produces such incredibly beautiful images.
But know that the rub comes after the footage is recorded. If you have visions of transferring high-def video clips to your computer and working with them as easily as digital photographs, forget it.
