Digital Betacam uses 4:2:2 YCrCb sampling, whereas DV uses 4:1:1, so you have "half" the chroma resolution. DigiBeta tranfers use uncompressed Serial Digital Interface (SDI), which requires a fancy PCI card (such as a VideoPump) to get into and out of a PC. Inside the deck, it uses some light DCT-style compression, but nothing that most people could notice.

DV uses a $50 OHCI Firewire (IEEE-1394) card to transfer into/out of a PC, and the file sizes are significantly smaller than DigiBeta because the compression is in the file format and tranfer, not just the deck/camera. It's a little heavier compression as well, which can cause "mosquito noise" in areas with lots of detail.

Nearly any recent PC can deal with DV; you need a pretty snorty PC to deal with DigiBeta, and much larger hard disks. You can expect to pay about a magnitude more for the video hardware as well <g>.

I am not a DigiBeta expert, so I might have missed some things here, so if anyone else has any comments, toss them in.

///d@