Yeah... I always look at B&H for price comparisons and to see if a product is legit.

I sometimes wonder if they carry 'everything' or just what they feel is worthy.
I'm searching for a Cheap Alternative to purchasing an HDV Deck.

We currently use a $200 miniDV Camera to capture with.
I'm hoping to do the same with a cheap HDV Camera. (if there is such a thing)

Then, my next worry is... would I be able to monitor it using our current SD NTSC Monitors or would we need to purchase new HD Monitors?

- If the investment seems to be too much... then we will likely go with an XL2.

We bought a Sony HC3 for this purpose. Not exactly cheap but works fine w/o wear and tear on our more expensive cameras.

And in fact, now we don't go out on a shoot without the HC3 along. It's a great "tiny cam" and we put it into dangerous scenarios where we wouldn't want to risk our Z1's.

Nice picture - intercuts like butter.

v

If you're buying the XH A1 with the intent of shooting 24p ONLY a Canon camera can play the tapes. Think about a HV10 or 20.
Or do yourself a favour and get a V1U, the tapes from that in all recording modes playout on any HDV camera or deck.
I upgraded to the Sony M15U VCR. Rock solid, even better than the DSR-11 it replaced.

Bob.

The HV10 looks to be about the least expensive.

We're definitely not fans of the V1U as compared to the XH A1.
The M15U is out of our price range since we're also purchasing a Camera.

By using an HDV camera as a D/A Convertor... do we also need to purchase an HD monitor or can we still use our SD Monitors?

(sure would be nice to be working with an unlimited budget.)

Let me state the obvious... if you want to see it in HD, then you need an HD monitor. If you're asking if the HDV camera will downconvert on the fly from HD via Firewire from Vegas to SD for viewing on an SD monitor, I don't know as I've never tried it. I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

John