I know that good quality and inexpensive shouldn't necessarily be used in the same sentence but that's precisely what I need.

I've been planning on buying an el-cheapo third minDV to use mainly as the deck at my editing machine for pulling tapes but it makes more sense to throw a hundred or two extra at this and have a camera that could be use for a third shot camera for the live concerts that I'm recording.

So... sound isn't all that important on this camera as I'll have soundboard audio feeding into my GL1 and a good quality mic feeding my GL2. What I'm looking for is a good video quality single CCD miniDV with some configurability as I shoot at indoor venues and outdoors at night sometime.

It would be nice to not have a bottom loading tape since tape changes need to be fairly quick and this camera will be mounted on a tripod and pretty much left alone until tape change time.

I'm hoping to stick around the $400 mark. I'm looking at JVCs right now but don't find many reviews out there. Can any of you make suggestions?

Thanks,
Kevin

I think Panasonic has the market cornered in that low price range. You seem to get more for the money with theirs, and some used to have a 1/4" chip, as opposed to the 1/6" than many now have. I don't remember the numbers, but check out B&H.

Walmart was selling the Sharp MiniDV Viewcams for $299. Bought one and used it as a capture deck.

Panny PV-DV53. Manual exposure control. Good-sized
chip/low pixel count yields best low-light reach under $800 to $1000. Outdoors, in daylight, cuts
well with a VX2000, requiring very minimal color correction.
Sharpness not far off VX, either. Firewire out.

Sorry for getting out of topic abit...but i was wondering what's the different between using a deck player and a minidv cam as a deck player? Is there only the price different?

The cheapest miniDV deck is more money than the cheapest miniDV cam used as a deck.