I'm looking to purchase a new camera preferably the Sony A1, but I have a question that I need answered first before I buy any HD camera.

Im in college right now and they haven't upgraded to HD equipment yet and are unable to successfully shoot,edit,distribute anything in HD, but sometime in next year they will be upgrading to HD.

The Sony A1 is said to be able to shoot in HD,SD,and DVCAM my question is if I purchase the A1 am I able to shoot in SD so I can use the schools equipment for post production, or do you have to shoot in HD and purchase more equipment to downconvert to SD?

You can shoot regluar DV with it. You can also shoot HDV and downconvert to DV by a menu. That's what I am doing at the moment.

Always record in HDV because you can downconvert down to SD anytime. And when you are HD ready at your school, you already have the recorded footage to work on.

Cool choice, dude! I just got one myself.

One thing I'd like to say and I didn't want to start a new thread. It's small, much smaller than PDX-10, which I had previously. Not a single post mentioned that or may be I missed it...

Anyway, I plan to use it exactly as suggested here: to record in hdv and to capture as dv.