Hi Erm,

You're right to do a market study... coz not only is VHS toast, but regular DV isn't that far behind it...

We are in fast moving times... and it is easy to buy the wrong gear and spend lots of money doing so...

If the end of the year is your time scale you've heaps of time to study products and narrow it down to a few models....

Certainly by 2007, as I said before, getting a 4:3 SD camera is nuts...

No doubt by then Sony will have waded in with an update of the FX and Z1 cameras to counter the new Canons... but to my mind this is where your attention should be turned...

As to the rest of the gear; get the best you can afford... coz that will be with you far longer than the camera... mics, tripods, cables etc are not in the race..

Whatever you chose a camera will always be an ephemeral object; like a PC... almost obselte before you use it...

Finally one thing I've found on the larger DV and HDV cameras is that the manual controls are far better... the Z1 is very good for that... I had a TRV950 before and while in good conditions the video was lovely... the menus and small controls drove me nuts..
Being able to focus and adjust the iris relatively quickly is a must for me now...

Good hunting
Gareth

Again, try emphasizing that they'd lose nothing by getting a camera capable of shooting both HD & SD, and they'd gain future options which might have MARKETING VALUE. If they can't grasp that they should be looking for other jobs.

Yes I'd skip the GL. The DVX100b is a good choice. But I'd wait a couple of months. We know the new Canons are coming out. Lot's of rumors about new Sony's. At this point it might not be a bad idea to have a camera that does HDV and DV. I don't think that format is going anywhere for awhile.

I have to respectfully disagree with the HD suggestions. It certainly doesn't sound like they are going to want to shoot anything in HD for years and years (by then you'll be ready to upgrade), and it doesn't sound like they will be too excited about the marginal increase in quality that you get shooting HD and downconverting to an SD output. I think that the extra couple thousand that you would save going with a DVX100 will be better spent on other things that will make a more immediate improvement to your output.

I recently covered a week long festival with my buddy. He has a DVX 100B and I shot with 2 FX-1s. I dumped the HD footage into Vegas and downconverted it. Then we layed his DVX footage in beside it. He said he was "embarrassed" by the image quality of the DVX compared to the FX-1s.

You are also not taking into account the 16:9 factor. That will come into play very soon.

Also, the FX-1s aren't a couple thousand more than DVXs. At most it is a couple hundred.

Maybe in the prosumer world, sure, but not in the business world. I have done shoots straight to VHS tape for a large, national public relations company as recently as 2005. It might be fun to be on the bleeding edge of camera technology, but that doesn't necessarily translate to financial success in the business world if the customers aren't asking for HDV. SD cameras will continue to be in use for as long the customers keep asking for them... And, as of this week, they still are. :-)

But again, note that any of the HD cameras they might be considering can also shoot both regular and widescreen SD, so there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting HD-capable gear. SD-only cameras are a poor investment these days unless you have a very specific reason to buy one.