Hard disk. Have my HDR-SR1 for 2 years now. It's great. exports via USB and has hdmi output too.

hard disk, if for nothing else the USB export since even apple cut the damn FireWire inputs.

miniDV if you care about quality, or you're going to do a lot of editing or live streaming:

Beware the tapeless camcorder.

Canon and Sony are the brands I have used. I have a Canon HV20 and a Sony HC7. I prefer the Sony in most respects. Here's a good site for comparisons and reviews:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/

It's unbelievable how stupid the consumer electronics manufacturers were when they designed their hard drive, DVD and memory card camcorders.

This article is over a year old, but it's true in the beginning there was no editing software for AVCHD, but there are plenty now. You can also record in 10mbs mpeg format too.

also go to http://sonyhdvinfo.com

Yes, the article is over a year old. However:

- you cannot do high-quality live streaming from any hard drive, memory card or DVD camcorder that I am aware of

- SD video quality is better on miniDV than with the ones that use compressed formats

- there is still a lot more software that supports DVSD and HDV compared to AVCHD, MPEG-4 and the MPEG-2 formats

- editing is considerably faster for DVSD and HDV, especially for SD content

- the archival advantage for tape remains true

Thanks guys, keep it coming. Good info here.
Quality is important to me. I know DVD recording camcorders are worst in quality.
Hard drive are getting cheaper(saw 1TB for less than $100 the other day) and with fast USB archival from disk should not be an issue.
What camcorders do 1080p?

What are your primary uses for the camcorder?

As far as 1080p, check out the site I pointed you too earlier

And for archiving, it's true you can transfer to disk and archive the data on those disks but that requires an "organizer" type personality. In my experience, it's a lot easier to put a label on a tape and put it in the tape drawer

- What do you mean high-quality live streaming ?? MY cam has a HDMI output and and streams great.

True that AVCHD might take a little longer to transcode compared to HDV since it is compressed and that is really my only gripe.

The quality between both have no noticeable difference generally.

AVCHD will burn straight to a DVD in bluray format with no encoding/transcoding.

I have both a HDV camera and like the Hard Drive based AVCHD camera and haven't used my HDR-HC1 since. AVCHD was ahead of its time but I think its really matured in the two years since it came out and everything has caught up with it.