UK Models, or actually EU models only have a small item in the cams firmware changed that stops recording back, it doesn't have anything to do with PAL/NTSC units.
Panasonic along with other manufacturers use this to keep the price down, blame them, they could quite easily change the firmware and have a model which records back to cam and charge more for it.
The fact that a few years back firmware flashing units were very popular is proof it is very easy to do, but these units have now been banished from sale
When I bought my first minidv cam, it was a staggering difference, I paid about 800 UKp and the dv in/out model was about 1,000 UKp
Didn't realise how handy dv-in was until I needed it, but 35 UKp for a widget was all I needed. It flashed the firmaware adn could reverse it as well if the cam needed to go back to canon for any reason.
The chap who made these is a great guy, but you should have seen some of the eltters he had threatening him with all sorts from all the leading cam manufacturers, who no doubt saw a great drop in dv-in sales. It ended with an agreement to just sell off existing stock and not to produce or develop any more.
I suspect this model is too new for a widget though
It's game, set and match, chaps. I went through the same hoops with X2 Pro trial version only to get the same error message but after some random clicking I got to second base with PAL instead of NTSC coming up as time format. Then I got a message to the effect that the camcorder couldn't record back to tape.
I looked more carefully at the manual and did find the "This model cannot be used as a recorder" warning and, yes, there's no DV-in socket. In the UK we use the word 'snookered' to describe such an inpasse!
However, I've just caught sight of a new Plextor external drive (PX-MPM320U), 320Gb, that has video and audio outputs. This would hold 24 hr of high-quality avi content and avoid convertion losses. It retails in the UK for £133. Now if I can find it on Ebay from Taiwan .....!
not sure if the word is snookered or buggered, though the latter might incur the wrath of the thought police....
We need Graham to coax his buddy out of retirement....
The UK has always been a rip-off. I could never understand why the same cheap Chinese plastic item costing $5 at Walmart in the US would cost a magical GBP19:99 in the UK. I think things have improved lately, so you can buy a kettle at Tescos for a fiver - but some of the same silly import duties still apply to consumer goods resulting in the nonsense you are experiencing.
In the US right now, the best value in hard drives seems to be in the 750Gb ones, which you can find online for about $90. You can buy an external enclosure for just a few dollars, or buy a hard drive already installed in an enclosure for a few dollars more than buying the two things separately.
My preference is always to buy the drive and the enclosure separately. There are now three common ways to connect your drive. First of all USB, which is OK, but sometimes you have to be careful how many USB devices you have connected to your pc, since they all use up bandwidth, which can limit the transfer speeds. You can also connect by firewire, which is generally about the same speed as USB, but doesn't suffer from the same bandwidth effect - principally because you don't tend to have a bunch of firewire devices connected - unless you're a mac person...
I would strongly recommend an external enclosure that can connect by eSATA, however. The transfer speed almost matches that of an internal hard drive, much faster than either USB or firewire drives. Whilst most pc's don't have eSATA connectors yet (though many of the latest ones do) many of the eSATA enclosures come with an eSATA card which you can install in your pc to give you an eSATA port.
Many eSATA external hard drive enclosures can also connect by USB too - so you could still use the hard drive with an older pc or laptop etc.
Here in the US, we have the "Black Friday" sales coming up soon, and I'll be looking out for deals on hard drives amongst other things.
Hey, so you gotta be more forceful huh? You gotta problem with that?
That sounds like a decent price on the hard drive, and I guess you don't get so many dollars to the pound these days... I've had to stop drawing out cash from my UK accounts with my ATM card over here for now....
