Trying to revive the thread, don't know if it's in the right forum though..
What our team is currently using the most is an Canon HV30, see link below.
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Move-Over-HV20-Here-Comes-the-Canon-HV30-34020.htm
I am very pleased with this camera, just perfect for us backcountry riders!
- It works great outdoors in cold weather; no problem with picture, no tape jams and the battery time is very good with the original battery!
- It is not expensive, well worth the money!
- The optics is great; very nice picture in any light conditions and it has 20x optical zoom, you almost never need more on our level.
- There is also an optical image stabilizer, which obviously reduce shaking and also motion blur.
- You can manually adjust the focus which gives you the opportunity to make nice blurs and chose where you want your focus.
- The sound recording is also very good.
The only thing which isn't great is the fact that you have to use tapes which can drive you crazy when you are trying to get all the material on your computer!
It would have been better with a fast memory card camera. The other this is that it "only" records in 30fps, which is maximum for every compact camera I know of.
But and many people may ask why we didn't buy a hard drive camera instead because they are much easier to use?
Number 1, I have never heard about a harddrive camera that records in "real" full HD quality.
Number 2, because they fail as fast as it gets cold.
Number 3, they can't take any abuse.
Number 4, if it just shakes a little the picture gets f***ed up, we even mounted our camera to the outside of a car racing a track and the picture was great all the way, even though it shook a lot.
Unfortunately i don't have any clip we have filmed with it that I can show you yet, but soon we will at least have a teaser from last winter to show.
Cheers! :beer;
