Over the past several months I’ve researched video camcorders fairly extensively. My requirements were pretty simple, I thought. I wanted something mainly to film my kids’ memorable events, basic home movie stuff. I did a lot of reading on line, checked out tons of reviews on Amazon.com and many other sites. I almost felt compelled to spend the $26 for a subscription to Consumer Reports, but that seemed like overkill for this particular purchase.

After looking at the various options, I figured I wanted to spend less than $300 if possible. I knew I wanted a Hard Drive-based recorder, since they can record for a REALLY long time, and I REALLY hate dealing with tape. Those Flip Video things are sexy as hell, but they don’t have the recording time I need, and the convenient YouTube upload feature isn’t really necessary.

Having identified the basic type of camera I was after, I ventured into BestBuy several weeks ago, only to be reminded of what a useless waste of real estate those brick-and-mortar stores have become. Typically there was only one salesperson who knew anything at all about the camcorders, and he was trying to help 3 customers at once while a bunch of his blue-shirted lackeys sat around staring into space. After finally getting this guy’s attention, I settled on a refurbished unit that seemed workable, only to discover that they couldn’t actually find all of the parts. You lose, BestBuy!

Over the following weeks, I waited for a deal to show up on line, and sure enough one did, thanks to Twitter. I started following Albert “The Cheap” a few weeks ago, and sure enough he posted a link to the Sony Online Store that had just what the doctor ordered! $250 with free shipping! Cowabunga! Really glad I jumped on this, too, since they are out of stock now.

Now, the only gotchya with these Sony Handycams is, if you’re on a Mac, you need a few extra pieces of software to be able to play and convert the videos. Also, it’s not immediately obvious how to get the video off the camera and onto your Mac. So here are a few tips that I hope will be useful to someone. I hunted for this info for quite a while.

1 – You *can* mount the Handycam DCR-SR42 (and probably other similar USB-based models) directly on your Mac. You do NOT need to run a Windows emulator and the crappy video transfer software Sony provides with the camera. Just plug in the USB cable to your Mac, turn on the camera, put it in “disk” mode, and it should come up as a drive in the Finder. The video files can now be accessed directly from the Finder as shown below.

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For converting the files to QuickTime, MP4, etc., you will need the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component from Apple ($20), and the Streamclip video converter. I think it’s pretty lame that Apple charges $20 for this component, but it doesn’t support MPEG-2 audio.

For playback only, I suggest the VLC media player. You do NOT need the Apple MPEG-2 component to just play back the files.

Now, some purists will be concerned about loss of quality when converting from MPEG-2, but I’m not too worried about it. For those folks, here is the list of cameras supported by iMovie 8. For whatever reason, these cameras are all a lot more expensive than mine. Maybe they’ll add “native” support for my SR42 some day. Until then, I don’t think my mom will notice the difference. 🙂