I received quite some email the last few days, following my popular videography article at OSNews. Many of the readers who emailed me want to buy an HD camcorder — and many of them are actually interested in 24p support. I don’t want to sound as an elitist, or even downright weird, but I must say: Stop. Buying an HD camera is not just a matter of buying just the camera because in order to fully appreciate it, it requires a lot of related hardware.
The average person still runs a 2-3 year old PC or laptop with 512 MBs of RAM. Why? Because simply put, it still works fine for basic computer tasks. Now, in order to edit HDV, and especially the more hungry AVCHD, you need a top of the line less-than-2-year-old CPU, 2+ GBs of RAM and large hard drives. Let’s just say that you can find such a PC for $1000.
Then, you need the HD camera itself, which costs anything between $850 and $1200. Then, you need software that supports HD. Premiere and Vegas are the best options for those serious about video editing, so that’s another $100. So overall, let’s just say that you need another $1000 for both.
Then, you need an HDTV. While in USA 36% of the population already has an HDTV, in Europe it is more like 5-10%. For a basic 32″ 1080i LCD HDTV you need another $500.
And then, you need to be able to watch your videos in HD without having to deal with tapes. And the best way to do that is not to buy Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burners+players+software which is just too expensive, but to use the PS3 or the XboX360 as h.264/m2t/WMV playback devices (they can store the video files on their hard drives, or by burning the HD files on plain DVD media). And that would be another $500 (sorry, the cheaper AppleTV v1.0 does not support full HD).
So basically, what I am saying here is that for the average Joe, moving from his DV camera to an HD one and truly appreciate it, he will need anywhere from $2000 to $3000. The product prices will come down, but not that much. He will still need to pay a lot of money to get the full Monty. Eventually, he will have to cave in and buy these upgrades, but my point is, he might want to start with an HDTV rather than an HD camera.
So my advice to you is: if you have that kind of money to spend just so you can properly enjoy HD, go ahead and do so. If not, keep that plain DV camera. At least for now.