gv-d900 any good?
 

i cant seem to get search to work on this site, if you can let me know how, thats great
otherwise, what is the deal with this deck? i dont intend to spend thousands on a capture deck but dont want to use an old mini dv camcorder. btw, do you get better quality image capture on a deck like the gv as opposed to an old canon elura?
and what of / how to eval head wear? should i be concerned about a used ebay special if it works great upon recieving.
regards,
greg

i truly appreciate your time.

i have had this deck since it first came out...it does not have drum hour meter but i would have to say that it has seen about 10 hours of roll 50 weeks a year for about 4 years straight, thats about 2000 hours...

this year it started going wacky on me and i sent it to sony paid a whooping 175 bucks to get it fixed and it works fine now...so much for sony consumer stuff no standing up to the abuse of a production studio...

there is not much to the device expcept for the nice screen which is great in when i need to review footag ein the field, i like the slomo feature as well, i really don't get a chance to use the other features like audio dub or image overlay....

every now and then it won't like a tape i stuff it with, on those occasions i just rewind the tape and all is well, i don't think my unit likes to start off on a tape where the timecode has just ended...

you will not get better picture quality using this vs a any other dv deck, but you get nice big buttons, and a large screen with a decent speaker, its clampshell so it easy to pack, but the power adapter is a pain, its a power adapter and battery charger all in one, its big and clumsy....not sure if you can work out another adapter on the net somewhere i never looked...

when my deck broke this year i was like damm, i don't want to shell out for another one, actually they don't make them anymore i don't think, and we already have a dsr11, its not as portable, i was just going to get another mini cam for about 200 off ebay, but as i said for 175 sony fixed it...

because it has served me well i give it 2 thumbs up...BUT my advice is save your cash for somthing that might actually make a difference and get a used cheap mini dv cam

The deck is OK and for some apps is the only thing that'll do the job however for my money not quite upto it for serious work, the buttons fail, not that you'll use them much. I invested in a DSR-11 18 months ago and so far put over 1000 hours on the heads without a glitch that wasn't due to dodgy tapes. But then again most of the material I work with comes off DVCAM on the D5 sized tapes so a MiniDV deck would be mostly useless to me.
One underrated feature of the DSR-11 is it'll handle both PAL and NTSC, that can be a godsend when you need it, quite useless if you never do.
The other alternative if you don't mind something bigger is the older DSR-30 / DHR 1000s, built to last those beast were although better check, I'm not 100% certain if they'll handle DV, maybe only DVCAM or is there some secret way to get them to?