Help with a new SD card camcorder

[eeyorewells]

I'm thinking of buying a new camcorder to take to Florida with us this year, I have seen some small SD card camcorders that also takes photos, 2 birds with one smaller stone! Reviews of them seem to be mixed so was wondering if anyone has any advice please or anyone has one that they think is good. However I don't really want to spend loads anything up to or around £150ish.
Help please.

[pinkferret]

have you thought of buying one out there? DF got a really good deal on his. bag, case, card etc from a shop on the 192 i believe?

[DisneyMad]

From what I've read, the camcorders that take pictures are never that good- but regular cameras that take video clips are. Both me and DGF have these. Of course if you wanted to film a whole show or parade you're stuck, but for smaller clips of Ben etc I'd recommend a regular camera with a higher pixel resolution, and a MASSIVE memory card!

[JasonC]

I actually bought HDD camcorder a couple of years ago it is a JVC a similar model is now selling for around £200.00 you may well get a deal on a unit like this, it has a 30Gb hard drive and accepts SD cards but to be far we have never managed to fill the HD as yet and never used the SD card function but I probably will this coming year as SD cards are so cheap now I can keep a full vacations worth of trip on 1 card.

[JuniorMickey]

You're better off with separate devices. A camera will take okay video and a video camera will take below average photos.

[Vikki]

I think we will still use the normal camera, we'll use this thing just for short video clips of Ben, we already have all the parades and shows on film anyway.....

[Spridge76]

I purchsed a similar type thing with a Sony TG3 HD camcorder which uses Memory Sticks, and it was one of the biggest wastes of money ever. An impulse buy that I now realise I won't ever really bother to use.
The still images were low resolution, and the moving images suffered from high compression which reduced quality. We only bothered taking it with us on 3 days during our entire break, and got less than an hours worth of video we bothered to keep (compared to over 1,500 photo's from my canon camera)

[Vikki]

Hum, he's ordered it now, hope it's worth it. Ah well, it was his birthday money :lol: We'll probably give it a go at Alton Towers first :lol:

[jak]

What did Anthony order in the end Vikki?

[Vikki]

Erm......I'll tell you when it arrives, I can't remember. Don't think it was the same as yours Jules.

[eeyorewells]

We have ordered this Aiptex (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiptek-AHD200-High-Definition-Camcorder/dp/B000VWJMVU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1244142379&sr=8-1)camcorder. Sounds really good and the reviews are generally good too.

[jak]

Looks good Anthony - great price! :wink:

[eeyorewells]

Its arrived- Love it, love it, love it. Its about 1/3 the size of the old camcorder we had takes brilliant quality video and the still images are 8M and so are very good. The screen display is easy to use, and it powers up and can start recording in under 2 seconds- great to capture those "I don't believe hes doing that!" moments. Imported the files onto the computer took all of 20 seconds because its a removable SD card rather than needing to plud the whole thing in and wait to download each individual movie. As you can probably tell I'm rather impressed at it for under £100.