Yes, Steve, I agree, and that is why I've been seriously considering purchasing the XL-H1...but following a great deal of thought (and watching the bank balance) I've decided that buying an extra XL2 is the wiser option, as I feel that 4:3 DVDs produced from the XL1s and 16:9 DVDs produced from the XL2 provide more than enough quality for almost 100% of the people that will be buying them (as long as my filming and editing techniques match that quality...).

we are still waiting for you to tell us how to make money with hdv.

so you were wearing out the tape drive of your camera, by using it as a playback deck... but a dv deck is only $200, vs. a $1400 hdv deck... now you are down by $1200, plus the absurd cost of hdv tape.

how much did your hdv edit solution cost? how much will an hd dvd authoring solution cost?

we are talking about making money with hdv NOW, not years down the road.

i can just picture you demonstrating hd footage on a 720 monitor, but then having to deliver sd dvd's... do you tell the client that you aren't capable of delivering what they are watching on the monitor?

The people who are most successful at that are apparently marketing aggressively to high end clients, and tacking on as much as 50% over their regular prices for HDV. Someone with more experience than I should be able to figure that out easily enough.

I've never owned a separate deck and never had a camera wear out from playing tapes too much, so I don't see a problem here. And I don't know anyone who's actually using $12 HDV tapes; I'm using the same tapes I used for DV and they're working fine. If anything I seem to be getting fewer dropouts in HDV than DV.

I spent about $2000 to build a new dual-core computer, which I could have held to $1500 if I hadn't splurged on some extras. HD authoring costs nothing extra for now using Windows Media on standard red-laser DVDs; still waiting to see what future options will cost. I figure the first time someone asks for an actual HD DVD, I'll probably take the finished file to a larger local shop and pay them to make the discs, so I don't have to shell out a grand or more for the burner.

If you can't make it work for you now, don't buy it. I'll admit I probably got ahead of myself to buy in early, but the image quality is better than I was getting from my old cameras so that's good enough for me for now. And I have some nice HD stock footage which there is apparently a market for, but I haven't gotten around to tapping into that yet.

For now I just show widescreen SD DVDs on my 1080i rear-projection HDTV and leave the HD details for clients who specifically ask about that. As we've discussed here before there have been ways to deliver HD content to customers for some time now, for those willing to be cutting-edge adopters. Most folks are happy with widescreen DVDs for now, and HDV works much better for me for making those than my old cameras would have done. If you wish, you can think of HDV cameras as widescreen DV cameras which just happen to have an option to record 700-800 TV lines of resolution on inexpensive miniDV tapes.