i just bought a canon xl1s. what i want to do is use my smaller and cheaper minidv camera as the playback machine to capture my footage. this way i won't put unneccessary wear on my expensive camera. the only thing i am curious about is, will there be any quality difference in playback between the cheap camera versus the expensive camera?

Assuming the camera you use is picking up the digital stream properly, it is merely relaying the digital information to the file being created in the computer. For years I have used a cheap sharp VL WD250 as my "deck" to capture tapes from my 3CCD Sony VX 2000. I have heard that some cameras tapes can't be read by other cameras tapes -- but I have not experienced that. My brother has an XL1 and I have also captured tape from his camera with that same Sharp.

There should be no problem if the footage has been shot in SP, but if it's
in LP it would have to be played back on the same model of camera that it
was shot on.