I'm not sure how true it is, but I hear that HD video is much better on tape than a flash drive source. Again, that's just what I heard.
I'm not too picky on the media, and I already had a mini dv camera, so I had quite a few unused mini dv tapes laying around.
That's not true at all. Quality wise, there are a number of factors at work which don't just involve the media being recorded on. This is probably from the same people who think bit-rates are a direct measure of video quality, which (again) is far from true.
In a purely practical sense, you can achieve much higher quality with flash based media than tape simply because you have no upward cap on flash media except hardware limitations.
Dustin, I use the HV20 and I definitely prefer the tapes over flash drives. Although I think tapes vs. flash drives has been discussed before, I like having an immediate archive. A broken tape can be spliced together with minimal loss while a corrupted flash drive could mean loss of all data. On impotant video, I import into the computer and make a tape backup. There is the real-time wait for capture into a computer but this is not a major issue for me.
Bill Hark
That's definitely one great advantage to tapes and one thing I do miss about them. However, the benefits of going tapeless with a good secure workflow are just huge towards productivity. If you do your homework and set up things right, you can easily avoid any issues. But really, it's nothing more than personal preference as to which is better at this point. However, as technology continues to progress, tapes will become increasingly irrelevant for sure.
I'm surprised that so many are opting for the HV series over the new Flash Drive cameras, such as the Sony CX or the Canon HF series...Is there any (quality) drawbacks of the flash drive formats, or is quality the same and it just comes down to personal storage preference?
What surprises me also is how few people on ST are overlooking the obvious best option in HD-DSLRs. The old HV line of cameras was good a few years ago, and their low light performance is ok, but they have nothing both on image quality and in low light compared to the HD-DSLRs. The second and third generation models from Canon are very good. The Panasonic's GH1 is what I use, and I can shoot from a much wider range of focal lengths, at better apertures, all while capturing much better quality footage for the same price with better control over the image and no limits on recording time. Pound for pound (or dollar for dollar), no camera measures up to it under $10,000 except maybe another HD-DSLR and the EX1-R from Sony. It'll take some time yet, but in five years or so anyone worth their salt in professional videography will at least be using DSLRs on most jobs simply because of the advantages they offer which video cameras in the sub $10,000 market can't even touch -- much less cheap and comparatively inadequate consumer cams.
