Colevault.com

Here’s a funny story. Five years ago, just prior to our month-long vacation in Europe, I bought a fairly high-end Canon DV camcorder at the now-defunct electronics store The Good Guys. It was a great camcorder and though we didn’t use it terribly often we did capture many vacations and many hours of footage of Justin’s first two years. Then about five months ago it died during a trip to Maui. When I turned it on a warning bell sounded, the tape icon flashed on the screen, and when I tried to take the tape out it had been “eaten.” I tried some brand-new tapes and cleaned out the tape mechanism but the problem persisted. So the rest of the Hawaii trip had no video and I resigned myself to having to buy a new camcorder if I wanted to get any video of Chelsea as a newborn and Justin’s peak toddler years.

After the trip I put the camera aside and for four months I wasn’t able to find the time to research and buy a new camcorder. (Anyone who knows me well knows that I can’t make any significant electronics purchase without countless hours of online research and price comparisons.) Even as Chelsea’s due date neared and Justin’s antics got progressively more video-worthy, I still put it off. And then about two months ago I got a card in the mail from GE warranty services telling me that the extended warranty on my Canon camcorder was due to expire in June and offering me the chance to renew it! Wouldn’t you know it, I had purchased a five year warranty from Good Guys back in 2002 and completely forgotten about it, probably because I never buy extended warranties. I don’t know what I was thinking back then, especially in light of the fact that the warranty was $280 (!) which I discovered once I dug up the original receipt from my files.

So I promptly called the warranty company who directed me to package up the camcorder and ship it to Massachusetts to be repaired. I told them my daughter was due in a few weeks and they assured me I’d have it back in time. About ten days later I got the camera back (in the same box that I shipped it in) and when I fired it up several days later it ate my tape just as before! Furious, I called the repair company back and was informed that the camera was not repaired because it would cost $900! There was no paperwork or anything in the box to inform me of this. Then I was told that they were “awaiting authorization” from Canon to “buy out” the warranty at the current replacement value, which they do when the repair cost is prohibitive.

So I was very happy to be getting cash to put toward a modern camcorder… right up until they called me back a few days later to say that a) Canon had approved the payout and b) the replacement cost would be… $296! They arrived at that figure by finding an “equivalent” camera at Circuit City and setting the payout based on that. Well of course a camera with five-year-old technology is only going to cost $300, but I paid $1200 for my camera, and $280 for the warranty! I would have MUCH rather had them repair my old camera, which still recorded perfect video.

So if you’re keeping score, after subtracting the warranty cost and the cost to ship the camera to the repair center, I ended up with $7 and no camcorder. On the other hand, the $280 for the warranty was a sunk cost so I moved on and excitedly turned my attention to researching a new (HD!) camcorder. After several days and lots of Googling I settled on the Canon HV20 HD camcorder with a 3 mp still camera and 10x optical zoom and image stabilization. The hardest decision was whether to stick with a tape-based camera or go with one of the new hard disk-based ones. After what happened with the tape mechanism on my old camera I was really leaning towards a disk-based one but then I read some reviews online that made a good point: once you fill up the hard disk you have to download the video to your computer before you can shoot any more. If you’re at home this is a non-issue but if you’re traveling you have to have a laptop with you at all times, which just isn’t feasible. It would suck to be filming some special event and fill up the disk with no way to clear space on the drive. With tapes you can carry as many as you like and reload whenever you fill one up. And once you transfer the video to your computer you’ll always have the raw footage archived on the tape in case of a disk crash. And let’s not forget the possiblity of a disk crash on the camera itself. And the final reason I went with tape is that I still have dozens of DV tapes that I have yet to transfer to my PC. So the ideal solution would be a hot-swappable modular disk system so you could carry an extra disk or two, and then eventually NAND flash cards once the capacity gets big enough for the massive HD video files. But for now tape makes sense for me, though I’m sure my next camera will be disk (or flash) based. Let’s hope this one lasts longer than five years though.

Anyway, I ended up ordering the camera from Dell since their bottom line price was the best, but as it is a brand-new model it was backordered for weeks and it only just arrived today, exactly a month after Chelsea was born. So we have no video of her birth or her first month. But now I’ve got a new toy to play with and I’m looking forward to filming the kids this weekend. Then I’ll have to figure out how to post some short clips here on Colevault. Let’s just hope that my four-year-old Dell PC can handle editing and converting HD video, otherwise I might just have to pick up one of those schweeeet new iMacs! Too many gadgets, not enough time, and definitely not enough money!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 12:13 am and is filed under Gadgets & Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.