EggXpert

I have been doing research on the purchase of a new camcorder as an upgrade to our Panasonic PV-GS15 miniDV.  I have researched here at  Newegg as well as local businesses and I have found that the newer models do not supply a firewire port unless well out of my price league.

We have found that firewire is a better choice than USB 2.0 for downloading to our PC in terms of quality, especially sound wise.  Our SIGII firewire card that we purchased here from the Egg with the Texas Instruments chipset is excellent.

Perhaps I haven't done enough research but I have yet to find a newer model camcorder with firewire which is surprising considering that the newer 800 speed is readily avaliable.

Perhaps someone can steer me in the proper direction or set me straight on the matter.  Thanks. 

Any decent MiniDV cam is gonna have "firewire", how would you capture your video otherwise? I have never heard of capturing MiniDV video over USB. It kinda has to have a firewire port.

I think the part that confuses people is that they never call it "firewire". 

An example is the Canon HV40. They call it the "HDV/DV Terminal". But it is infact the firewire port.

Hopefully that helped.

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Yes, Firewire is techonlogically superior to USB in that it has chipsets on both end of the connection that handle most of the throughput...  USB on the otherhand, puts all the work on the host computer and does it through the CPU.. So most high speed USB devices are CPU limited, especially since the USB Windows Bus drivers are typically single threaded (at least, per device)..

The major problem with firewire, and the reason it hasn't taken mainstream is the exact same reason above.. It's more complicated, it's much more expensive to implement, it's more expensive to license, it requires a support chipset at the device which puts real limits on how small a firewire device can be, and it's going to drain more power since the chipsets used are usually less efficient than a modern CPU.  (Especially bad if you're hooking up a battery powered laptop to a battery powered device).

You're not going to be able to feasibly put Firewire into really tiny devices (Check out the size of those USB Bluetooth dongles, TV Tuners, and Flash memory sticks)..  USB devices are VERY simple compared to their firewire counterparts and that alone gives it more flexibility, more portability, more power efficiency,  more connectivity (more USB devices can plug into a single USB HUB than a Firewire Daisy Chain) and also makes it more popular..

If all you care about is raw I/O performance then Firewire is going to be the way to go because you just can't beat the hardware accelerated chipsets on both ends of the connection that are a part of Firewire.. On the otherhand, if you go with USB, all you need to do is upgrade your CPU and you automatically get faster I/O if you need it..

Apple made Firewire and in the last few years has dropped Firewire support on it's iPods (at least, I know it's gone on the Shuffle and the Nano).  I think, that alone should tell you something.. I mean, with CPUs as fast as they are, you really don't need to have dedicated chipsets on the device for I/O and people would rather have a smaller, lighter, and more power efficient product..

But for camcorders that send ridiculous amounts of data, Firewire will likely be around for a very long time.

Thanks for the quick replies.  As you can surmise this is an area that I will not lay any claim to having a working knowledge at this point.  Believe it or not our Panasonic has both USB and Firewire to capture video but as I said the firewire quality is considerably better especially in the sound department. 

Thanks for all the information as well, i.e. HDV/DV Terminal is actually firewire.  That is very helpful to know.

Sidicas, excellent sucinct expnantion about firewire.  I learned something new today and I really appreciate it.  If I can continue to do so I'll stick with firewire.  Many of the most recent motherboards provide firewire, it now has a faster version, and I like the quality better.  It will be interesting, however, to see USB 3.0 when it becomes fully mainstream.