Originally Posted by Win2Win
Methinks you're thinking of the drives from the 90's!! They are very robust now, and most, like the camera I mentioned, have anti-shock in them.
Tapes....move rapidly, and you get blocks on the tape, DVD...move quickly, bang it, DVD corrupts.......ANY dropped camera will possibly break something...so you don't drop them!!!
Never dropped a camera in my life.
If hard drives survive a journey on the Space Shuttle, they'll pretty much survive anything.
I agree they are more robust, and we no longer have to park them manually, but they all still have the maximum Gs they can be exposed to printed on them, and a 3' drop will cause many more Gs than the shuttle would experience. Also some laptops, and cameras, detect vibration and move the heads of the hard drive to a position off the platters.
The picture quality is the same as tape, but the price is higher. A 40GB drive could well hold all the video from a holiday, if it went wrong or got "lost" and there was no backup, everything would be gone.
I have spent the last couple of weeks with a very similar decision, as I may visit in August. I decided to take the small camcorder, and a Panasonic TZ1 and TZ3 (my daughter will use one) instead of the Olympus E510. May not offer the best solution as far as images go, but I think it offers the best chance of coming back with the photos I want, and I wont look like a Yank tourist waiting to be relieved of cameras.
Of course if nothing went wrong, any choice would be OK, and if the choice made goes wrong, it will be the wrong one, no matter how good it looked!
