The camera world sure does love it’s acronyms. With several formats competing to be the future standard of video recording, it can be difficult to know exactly where to invest your money.

To summarise for camera virgins out there, your main options are MiniDV (standard semi-professional tape format) using HDV (an inexpensive high def format that uses MPEG2 compression to fit HD format onto standard def MiniDV or DV tapes) and AVCHD (a high definition recording format introduced mid-2006 and storable on hard drive, disk or memory card).

There’s an interesting conversation in AVS Forum about the relative merits of MiniDV and AVCHD cameras, as FoF404 deliberates whether to upgrade to an HV20 or HG10. DLCPhoto has heard that ‘the MiniDV recording of HD has less compression and higher data rate capture than AVCHD, and therefore has somewhat superior image quality’ and that ‘even though AVCHD might be the future standard, as it stands right now, tools for working with these files are less available and mature than for those to work with the files from MiniDV’. Cagey is also worried about the potential problems with editing: ‘I would like for a hard drive solution to work for me, I just want to make sure I don’t sacrifice other features for convenience.’

However, Kring strongly believes that, despite the teething issues with software, any investment at this point has to be in AVCHD, and that the HG10 is a great camera to choose:

So, is AVCHD still too raw or would it be madness to buy anything else at this point? Join the debate.