Yeah, that beauty up above is the latest (as of this writing)  Sony HDR-XR500V with a 120GB hard drive.  That should last you about 10 minutes when shooting HD video.  Just kidding!  It actually records about 14 and a half hours of high definition video.  Not bad at all.  So, why do people love hard drive camcorders?

It’s sooooo Easy!

Good question mate.  Well, they like it because it’s super convenient.  Think about it.  No shuffling tapes or stupid memory cards in and out.  Now you have an embedded drive media that you can access to your computer.  So, the HD hard drive camcorders are getting a lot like your computer.  And that makes transferring them to your computers so much easier.  Soon, the transfer rates will be very high.

There are Downsides?

Unfortunately, because of the addition of the hard drive you can pay for it.  Hard drives are prone to fail at some point.  That means, like iPods and such, that the drive will fail in time.  This will be hastened by rough treatment.  Just keep that in mind when you put take the high definition camcorder out of the bag and put it back.  Be gentle!  Some day very soon they will be putting out these camcorders with solid state drives.  Then the shock issues will be great reduced.  Their lifespan will also be lengthened.  A solid state drive is simply like a giant flash card.  It’s super fast and doesn’t have any moving parts.

It’s in the Juice

Another potential issue is battery life.  Because you are now powering a mechanical drive, it can deplete batteries quicker.  Some models I see have a 40 minute battery life.  So, I guess 14 1/2 hours is kind of funny considering.  Yeah, it will take you multiple charges to get through that drive.

Whooooaaa, Slow Down

Another interesting issue is storage.  People used to keep the stock tapes around.  They usually didn’t transfer all that data to their computers.  Now, you are stuck doing exactly that!  Now, there are two potentially nasty gotchas here.  One is actual storage on your computer.  HD videos take up a lot of space – fast.  Most people will have to buy an external drive to compensate.  But that’s not all.  Now you have all this precious family footage in one place.  And that is prone to failure.  Yep, you guessed it – backups are now very, very important.  So, you need to think through that issue.

How Much Did You Say?

The last issue is that of price.  You will pay a premium for those hard drive models.  The higher end ones are going for $1,000-$1,4000 right now.

But, for all these headaches, hard drive camcorders are still awesome!  They are convenient and fun to use.