I have a sony handycam that records on the mini DV tapes. It's a nice enough camera for me, but it's nothing very fancy. When we bought this, we were thinking about the hard drive models. Several different sales people in different stores mentioned that they can be bad if you are rough with them (like in a hunting situation) because like a computer, being bumped while writing to the hard drive can damage the data or even the device. That was a year ago too though and I'm sure they've worked on those issues.

rw