So I’ve already made my picks for the best camcorders under $200 and under $500, but now we get to the category that gets all of the media attention these days: Best Consumer HD Camcorder. You’d think that with all of the choices available and with all of the advertising that has gone into marketing camcorders in this category this holiday season, that this would have been a tough decision for me… but it wasn’t. So this time I’m not only going to tell you which one I picked as a winner, but also which ones I DIDN’T pick and why.

So the winner is the Canon HV20 HDV Camcorder which captures images in the larger HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 onto a mini DV or mini HDV tape. It uses a 1/2.7″ CMOS sensor chip to capture those images, which tends to process faster than the more standard CCD chip found in a lot of cameras. In this price category it also tends to capture richer color and sharper detail than it’s competitors. But my favorite feature is that it can capture footage at the movie film rate of 24p, something that is practically unheard of at the $750 price-point that this camera regularly sells for. (Turn on the camera’s “Cine Mode” when capturing in 24p if you want to try to achieve a more film-like look to your video footage.) The HV20 also has an HDMI output so you can hook it up directly to your new HDTV and it has a optical image stabilizer to get you smoother results when you zoom in using the 10x optical zoom. A 3.1 megapixel still camera that records images to a mini-SD card rounds out the cool features found in this camera. I am a little disappointed that it doesn’t do better in low-light situations (this is where 3 chip CCD cameras usually do better), but for the money this is one incredible camera. In fact, right now B&H is offering a $75 Gift Card along with Free Shipping and a Free Training DVD… which cuts the effective price down to $675! That means that you can get an HD camcorder for only $175 more than my mini-DV camcorder pick from last Friday!!

CONTENDERS I DIDN’T PICK
I like the Sony HDR-CX7 ($1,100) and the Panasonic HDC-SD1 ($800) because they both record to solid state memory based cards, similar to your digital still camera (the Sony to MemoryStick Pro Duo cards and the Panasonic to SD cards). I really feel that this is the way all video recording is going in the near future — away from tape capture and recording directly to a digital file. In fact, the Sony HDR-SR7 ($1,100) is a good choice if you want a camera that has a 60 GB hard drive built into it. But the problem with all of these cameras is that they record to the AVCHD format which is highly compressed and is, quite frankly, a pain in the butt to try to edit. On the Mac, you can use any of Apple’s software (iMovie 08, FCP Express 4, FCP 6.0.2) to edit your files, but you’ll find that all three of the programs transcode the AVCHD format into the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). This means that your 4 GBs worth of AVCHD video files quickly turns into 40 GBs of crowded editing footage on your hard drive. And on the PC the only decent AVCHD editing solution is to buy the pro level Sony Vegas application (retail $699), a solution that costs almost as much as the cameras. All-in-all, I’m just not sold on the AVCHD format yet.

Check in tomorrow for my pick for the best Pro Level HD Camcorder!

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