Andy Ihnatko recently posted a photo on flickr of his attempts to test several HD formatted digital camcorders. The photo itself is interesting in that he's got three of these things to play with - that's pretty cool.

What I'm curious about is: are they worth the money? And the effort? We have a newish mini-DV type camcorder that works pretty well. I plug a firewire cable in and can edit things in iMovie and turn the tapes into movies to share with the family - and that's fun and everything, but I basically have to watch the footage before I can do anything with it. I usually use this time to review what I want to keep and get rid of, so it's useful, but as anyone who's done any editing of home movies, or any kind of editing of movies, knows, you usually have a lot more footage than you need.

What it comes down to is... do these cameras speed up the editing process at all? Does it make importing faster? Is there a conversion process to deal with to get the footage into iMovie?

One of the reasons I loathe making the family movies is all the time it takes to import the footage - and as you might imagine, with 4 kids, there's a lot of footage. Since the newer camcorder we have can only fit about an hour on a tape (and we've only tried it a few times so far, just making sure it works ok), that means I'll have a lot of work ahead of me, and a lot of footage to log - and quite a bit of tape swapping to do. Again, it is usually worth the trouble and effort in the end, but it's a lot of work to do - so is there a way to avoid some of it?

I need some real world feedback - which camera's are worth it? Which ones are dogs? And which ones work with the Mac OS X (which seems like a silly question these days, with Apples ever increasing market share....