arclight said:
what's the difference between Hi8, D8, mini DV technologies offered by sony?
Hi8 - is the oldest of the three. It's an analogue format. A Hi8 tape records video on 8mm tape at qualities significantly better than VHS on much less amount of tape than VHS. Hi8 will soon be history.
D8 - is newer than Hi8 and records DV like digital signals on 8mm analogue tape (same stock used for Hi8 tapes). D8 cameras can record and playback D8 tapes digitally. They are backward compatible, so they can playback and record older Hi8 and Video8 tapes too.
MiniDV - is DV on digital tape (smaller than Hi8, D8 ). DV is a digital compression algorithm (like MPEG) which records high quality video on tape. Sound quality is higher too, 12 - 16 bit CD quality sound. Audio dubbing is possible, where you can add a new audio track to an existing video track and output the result whilst previewing in realtime. These features can sometimes be found on D8 cams, but not always.
MiniDV is not backward compatible with D8, Hi8 and Video8.
MiniDV cameras can transfer video digitally via Firewire (like D8 ) but at much higher speeds than older analogue formats.
Hope this cleared most of your doubts. I've exclusively used miniDV for the past year and can assure you it's much more convenient than D8 while transferring data. The only advantage D8 offers is cheaper tapes.
Keith