I have had a bunch of Panasonic DVC 7's DVC 10's all bite the dust quickly. My one Canon XL1 did good service but has bit it as well. My original Sony PD-150 and 5 other PD-170's refuse to die.

I would look for a used PD-150 or 170 and send it to Sony for a spruce up for about $300 and expect it to out live you.

Your mileage may vary.

I only have 20 or 30 DV/HDV tapes but I don't have a camcorder to play them back with anymore. There are very few HDV camcorders left on the market.

I'm going to buy a used Canon HDV camcorder and transfer all my tapes to Blu-Ray data discs.

You're right, the time to do something about it is now!

Just watch eBay and the local electronics store discounters like Best Buy. I have a little cheapo Canon mini DV camera that was a store return and cost me $150. It's very simple but it shoots true widescreen and I'm not afraid to put in cheap wet lubricated non-Sony tapes into the thing. It is also a pretty handy thing to ask when your kids ask if they can use one of your cameras to shoot things like dirt bike riding or want something they can throw into their backpacks.

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I don't know if things have changed, but when I first got my Blu-Ray burner I was very disappointed in finding out that Blu-Ray data discs could only be burned onto re-recordable media, about $10 a pop back then. It was half as expensive to copy the files to two hard drives then, probably even cheaper now.

I can highly recommend Sony's HVR-M15A or HVR-M25A VCRs.
There's several other more expensive models that also handle, DV, DVCAM and HDV with firewire and HD-SDI connections. Some also have balanced audio i/o. We only recently bought a 2nd hand DSR-2000 which also does DVCPro-25, no HDV though.

The transports in the M15 and M25 are way better than the earlier transport used in the DSR-11 which we have since sold off.

Bob.

Ditto on the Sony HVR decks. I have an HVR-m25a and it works flawlessly. love the little lcd screen. I consider it indispensable after having used it for awhile. Don't buy any junk cams, get one of these decks, you will not regret it.

Also, I burn data to a BD-R discs all the time with no problems. I use the included (WIN 7) utility which works great. Don't need to use re-recordable discs, if I don't want to. Not sure why you are having the problem burning data to BD-R discs. Shouldn't be a problem.

Maybe because my production machine runs XP? I used the utility bundled in with the burner (LG) and when attempting to burn a data disc a dialog popped up informing me that I needed re-recordable discs to do that. Imagine how pissed off I was...

You should have likely investigated further. I've burned Blu_Ray disks for over 2 years now. XP and Win7. Never an issue.