8mm Video Tape.

[pop3]

Having just bought a video camara, a samsung vp-l 907, I now find myself with the problem of knowing what 8mm tape is best to buy, the price's range from about 120 bht to 590 bht, do you get what you pay for ? my camara is Hi8, is Hi8 realy direrent from ordinary 8mm ? also when I playback on a tv screen the picture quality is faltless, very very clear, but when I download onto my pc the quality is rubbish, is this normal. any advice on this matter would be very much apreciated, thank's.

[Firefoxx]

Did you buy the camera recently? Hi8 and 8mm are old analog formats, the current format is DV (digital) or at least Digital8 (DV on 8mm tape) from Sony. Hi8 is somewhat better than 8mm, but DV is much better than Hi8. You should use Hi8 tape with a Hi8 camcorder. You can buy the cheap ones, as long as they're Hi8.

When you transfer analog data to your computer, the capture card is doing the conversion from analog to digital, and the quality will depend on the card and the settings. For DV, the transfer is digital, and more of a direct bit-per-bit transfer from the camera with no conversion, so all the data is intact.

I see that your camcorder has a transfer by USB function. It's probably doing the conversion on the fly, and the converter might not be very good, so you get bad quality.

I suggest that you ditch this camcorder and get a DV camcorder. The cheaper ones are around 15k baht.

[pop3]

Thank you very much for your time, I also have a dv camara altho it is one of the cheeper model's, but the quality is still very poor, it say's I need 65.000-colour video display card or better, is it possible that it is my computer that dosen't have enouth power to produce a decent picture ? I say this because when the picture is small it is much better than when I go to full screen.

[Firefoxx]

Your computer would have to be several years old to not be able to display 64k colors... about 10 years old. Anything newer usually can do up to 16 million colors. It doesn't have anything to do with computing power.

Again, if you connect your camera to the computer with the USB connection, you'll nearly always get a bad picture. If you want good quality, the same as you see on the camera, then you need a DV camcorder and a firewire connection to your computer (a firewire card is around 500-1000 baht). The next best thing is an AV-in card, but that involves conversion and analog signals.

[pop3]

Thank's again, you've given me lot's to think about !